Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense.
The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.
It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.
Ever since Apple moved to Services Strategy in 2014 it has been like this. Services were not there so they could provide a better experience for its "customers". I use the word "customer" here which is what Apple / Steve Jobs used to call their loyal fans, and not user. But to further growth their Revenue pie because they foresee iPhone one day will stagnant.
You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.
Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.
Fitness+ is actually super high quality, really well integrated with Apple’s products, and fun to use. I love it. I would happily pay the monthly Apple fee just for fitness+. I hope they don’t change it.
If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.
Over the past decade, there's been a lot of regulation forcing Apple to open up their "Apple only" integrated platforms.
It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated. If it wasn't, you'd go buy a market alternative (Android, PC). In my mind, this means that they spent a lot of time and dev resources (i.e. money) on their Frameworks. I think it showed. Time was spent on design. They focused on opening up capabilities "the right way."
Now that's pointless. If the iPhone is just an Android phone with a different coat of paint, then dev resources are going to be shifted to a place where Apple can distinguish themselves in the market, where they have platforms that they can control: Services.
Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.
Arcade is amazing for my kids, it’s the one thing that pushes the value of Apple One bundle high enough for me to pay it. I assume all games not in Arcade have gambling mechanics.
The lack of microtransaction/loot box/forced ads/etc driven gameplay is why I keep it. If I can get versions of newer games without all of that cruft, I’m happy. I’m also happy that the game developer gets paid for it.
> You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.
News+ is the only one of these that has poor quality.
Apple Music is extremely good, and pays artists better than many other platforms like Spotify. Unlike Spotify it isn’t enshittifying the product with video and podcast distractions. The software is good quality, native code, not a web wrapper. Plus, there’s a classical music focused version that’s entirely separate.
Fitness+ is a premier product in the space. Have you tried it? The workouts sync with your watch and it has top tier video production quality along with a ton of thought put into accessibility.
Arcade probably does need to have more games added and more attention paid to it, but it’s basically the only place to get mobile games that aren’t stuffed full of gambling mechanics, pay to win, and advertisements.
Apple TV+ is literally the new HBO. They produce some of the most critically acclaimed shows on the planet, and broke the record for number of Emmy nominations by a single studio last year. The software is actually good, which is only really true for TV+ and Netflix. The production values, bitrate, and technology integration (Dolby Atmos/Vision etc) is second to none. MLS coverage by Apple is also top tier, again, with other sports networks regularly mediocre broadcast quality. They’re also getting F1 for US viewers which is almost certainly going to be an improvement over the status quo.
"customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better.
"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.
It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.
I agree that “customer” is a better term. I’m not sure I agree with the rest of the rationale.
In my mind, “user” stated to take over when we started having web based services that were used by people, but they were the ones paying. For example, Google and Facebook. Both got paid through ads, so they advertisers were the customers. The “users” were just the eyeballs the advertisers wanted to reach. So, you had to make your service compelling enough for someone to use for long enough that they’d see enough ads to make it profitable to provide the service.
It’s more akin to talking about “viewers” or “viewership” when talking about more traditional media.
For Apple, they are generally looking to get paid by the ultimate consumer of the product. So to them, we are the customers.
> "It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create."
You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use").
People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not.
Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free.
People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.
The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow.
They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse.
Contrast with Apple TV+ which has insanely high quality shows. I feel like they arent advertising it enough and investing in it enough. One of my favorite shows that my daughter watches is on Apple TV+ the other on Amazon (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie).
Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.
A clear difference here is that Apple creates the TV+ shows and they don't create the News+ content. And I really don't think they want to get into the news content creation business.
For Apple to really win this space I believe they would need to release a cross platform Publisher tool and complete in the AMP space. Some kind of magazine design / web design software that publishes articles to a standard format and applies a layout over the top. Then the News app becomes a renderer/aggregator that does things better than the standard web browser.
They also bought and killed texture, a fantastic cross-platform magazine subscription service, to somehow further Apple News. I subscribed to Texture on Android. I wouldn't give a dollar to Apple News even if I was in the Apple ecosystem.
At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?
I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint.
It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook.
SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after.
Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined.
It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely.
Steve Jobs was all about the customer experience, hence so many of his famous quotes. Two like the most are:
- Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products
- His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation.
He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it.
As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet.
Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days.
The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences.
People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.
I looked a lot into the "universal paywall" business model where one subscription buys you access to articles from a wide range of news outlets. It's close to impossible to execute because the most prestigious outlets (ahem... The New York Times) won't give you the time of the day, even if you are startup royalty. That Apple has accomplished anything in this space is remarkable.
I ignore Apple News these days. I had high hopes when Apple bought the company that eventually became their News app. Alas…
Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".
We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection.
When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.
In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.
Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.
But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.
Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.
All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins? The intuitive dynamics to me would be that any way to trick consumers will be applied, and the bulk of the resulting spread will be captured by the ad companies via their auction systems. So we all get worse products with worse deals, and the difference goes into spying on people and convincing them to become more consumptive, i.e. to turn them into worse versions of themselves.
Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.
This sounds brilliant, makes too much sense, and suggests a new kind of ad blocker to escalate and reflect retribution back.
Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
The random-clickers have been around for a while, clicking through ads to try to break profiles on users and cost the ad networks more money than it is worth.
They have not been very successful in their goals. I suspect, without sarcasm, that that is because compared to the absolutely routine click-fraud conducted up and down the entire ad space at every level, those plugin's effects literally didn't even register. It's an arms race and people trying to use ad blockers to not just block the ads but corrupt them are coming armed with a pea shooter to an artillery fight, not because they are not very clever themselves but just without a lot of users they can't even get the needle to twitch.
I consider even "legitimate" ads scams. My products are more expensive (the marketing budget doesn't fall out of the sky, after all), and I am rewarded by being forced to view extremely annoying content in my day-to-day life? As a consumer, that sounds like a horrible deal to me!
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
It might be more pleasant for the people who are able to pay for every website, every magazine, every news source etc. (Maybe. I do discover a lot of things through advertising.) Probably less so for everyone else.
Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.
Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts.
If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.
And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.
You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
I can't say the AI scripted AI voiced "my wife bet my abs vs. a trip to Paris" and "I ordered this and was going to throw it away but then the heavens opened and angels descended and gave me this Alibaba tchotchke" are harbingers of the idiocracy. Because it's already here.
// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not.
Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
I'd generalize it to "I assume all ads on major platforms are scam." This includes especially channels owned by Google and Meta.
I remember back in 2010 I had to wait a week and correct my ad before it was approved and now they basically stream all kinds of scams without checking. They do have quite a few people, they could build a better scam detection system but it's against their interests.
What's annoying is they do have tons of scam detection crap, which seems to only trigger on legitimate advertising (insofar as any advertising is legitimate) - the problem is there are millions of people willing to work on getting scams through for pennies a day, and it doesn't cost them anything.
I don’t know if it is just a symptom of growing up during the days of the net’s Wild West and navigating through sites like gamecopyworld or what, but I just seem to have some inbuilt filter which doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of ads.
It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.
I do not have that filter, but I have been using ad blockers for so long that my tolerance for ads is near zero. Being interrupted by an ad is enough for me to close the tab or turn the device off.
I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.
Visiting friends/family sometimes I have to ask for the TV to be turned off so we can talk and visit. Not to make some sort of statement or signal my dislike for the content, but to stop having my attention grabbed over and over for useless dribble/ads. They do not understand how horribly distracting it is to someone who isn't numbed to its omnipresence.
There are really good ad blockers on mobile these days. I use AdGuard for Safari and it's as good as uBlock on desktop Firefox.
I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.
I also use adblock and what ends up happening as a consequence is the ads I do see are the shittiest of shitty ads that don't even come from a recognized network. :)
Who doesn't think this about themselves. It's like when people say they're immune to propaganda. Isn't this thinking what makes people think their smart devices are listening to conversations rather than targeted ads you only notice after it's had the effect on you.
Same here. What's worse is that some pages "highlight" content in a similar fashion to an ad in the middle and I'm a bit unaware of that content. Only when something doesn't add up I'll scroll back and see the missing content.
Gamecopyworld… now there’s a name I have not heard in a long time.
I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.
For me, it depends on how well-disguised the ad is. Ads quietly sitting there, informing? Those I blank out. The big flashy animations? Those make me switch to reader mode, or leave the domain entirely.
I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.
I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).
I bought a remarkably similar mug (last advert shown) from an add from different site [1]. Everything about it was a fake. Almost every feature they advertised did not exist (including the fact that it did not come in a gift box.) That was from a site I visit a lot and I wanted to show support. BTW the AI generated animation is quite cool, too bad it is not real...
I am surprised you could look at that page and expect to receive a quality product. The images all look like really low grade AI-generated renderings. The mug in the cupholder and the giftbox image in particular don't stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Not trying to make your situation worse, I just find it interesting what these sites are able to get away with to get people to part with their money.
Just as there's a cottage industry for "I made the game the scam ads show" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRDhiN50Vo0 I think there will soon be a cottage industry for "the scam ad was good, let's make it for real".
That mug is amusing but it should't be too hard for China to make something similar - but real (at least without the weird piston).
The weird thing about Apple News: as the article mentions, paying for “+” still shows ads, but not paying at all means you can’t see content that’s already free online.
Try it: when it tells you a story isn’t available without a subscription, search the headline and often the story can be read on its original source, for free.
I love how, on the "I am retiring page", the image of the old woman even has artifacts of the Gemini logo on the bottom right - someone very probably manually tried to blur them with a tool that was not meant for blurring.
Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.
Yeah it was always a trick scammers used. Scam emails (the more obvious ones - not sophisticated phising) always had typos or subtle grammar errors because authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes. It's the people that do not read thoroughly that are much more likely to fall for a scam.
I would imagine it might be the same with those ads.
> authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes
This "just-so" story gets repeated constantly in threads about scams, but I've never seen anyone put up any actual proof. The more likely explanation is that scammers are just bad at English since they're predominantly from poor third-world countries.
Spelling and grammar checkers are free; online translators have been better than that for many years now.
It could be sloppiness, but I think scammers just organically copied efforts that worked, and those were the ones with poor presentations because they pre-filter and so target the scammers efforts more efficiently. The scammers need not be aware of why it works.
I skimmed the pdf; they show a model where having such an early "filter" is beneficial to the scammer, but doesn't provide any actual evidence that it applies in reality beyond restating the just-so story.
The more you pay for a subscription, the more valuable it is to advertise to you -- maybe the classic example is The New York Times which has highly annoying advertising if you're a subscriber because you've qualified yourself.
Or rather, if you believe you are too poor to afford a $10 a month subscription you probably believe you're too poor to afford anything that is advertised. The model of "premium subscription with no ads" flies in the face of reality.
I would be willing to consider paying for vetted ads - in other words, you pay for the NYT and you get a guarantee that you're only seeing ads that have been personally vetted by the NYT for correctness, appropriateness, etc.
Advertising is speech and it used to be that if a magazine/newspaper printed a scam ad, it was horribly damaging to their business, both legally and morally.
What's the user appeal of Apple news or whatever the Google equivalent is? From the outside looking in the value is the feed, but that seems super creepy to me.
It is an awful lot of power to give these companies to decide how we use their devices to interact with the world _and_ how we view the world.
I don't want anyone curating the current events or long-form I read. I want to see the whole buffet and choose myself, even sampling the unsavory ones from time-to-time to keep myself in check.
I've an avid Apple News user, and while I haven't seen the sorts of ads in the article, I do gets lots of ads for tax filing software. Namely, Intuit TurboTax. They are the only ads I ever get.
What's more, if you even touch them while scrolling, it triggers the "download app" screen, even if I don't explicitly tap. This is new as of a few weeks ago.
I'm genuinely haunted by these TurboTax ads, I see that download app popup at least 3 times a day when I use Apple News. Truly cannot believe someone at Apple though that was an acceptable user experience for ads.
A trusted company works with untrustworthy companies to scam clients.
That's either incompetence or betrayal of trust. In both cases, the only solution is to be careful, boycott and press charges when something is illegal.
I've noticed that the apple news ads target sensitive issues. The retirement one is a good example of that. I've seen ads that appear to already know my financial status and health conditions. I tried the option to reset my advertising identifier, it doesn't seem to make much impact.
I do have a similar feeling, but about YouTube ads. Seems like the region where I live there's a problem with gambling apps and, even if I've never used any app of this kind or showed interest in gambling sites/platforms, I'm bombarded everyday by ads of gambling apps on YouTube.
Since last year, I've been reporting every gambling ad as "Promoting illegal product/service" (they are, in fact, illegal here) to no avail, there's no end to these ads nor seems like YouTube is willing to do anything but implement dark patterns to discourage reporting, such as delayed pop-ups when reporting to interrupt typing.
I noticed some time ago that others ads that seemed not related to gambling were also leading to gambling apps. They are categorized as anything, like Hotels, Banking, Cullinary and Education. Don't look like YouTube checks if the things being advertised are really what they claim to be. It's worse when you remember that kids also use YouTube a lot.
Sadly we are going to get more ads (Apple Maps is next). If it goes much further people will start questioning whether Apple products are worth the premium price.
In the 1980's TV ads in Uruguay were really simple. Some were just a static bi-colour image of a shoe or a coat, some text, and a voice would say "buy shoes at such shop at such address".
I guess that was at the same time the low point of marketing and also its most honest stage.
On top of that, that thing takes a bunch of fiddling in their own GUI to disable. I want a search bar for my home page. Nothing else. Then every once and awhile it will 'forget' its settings and put it all back. Edge/Chrome makes no difference to me it is the same code. But that first tab experience with edge is garbage. Probably why I mostly use Firefox still.
I just use “New Tab Redirect” in Chrome so I can make new tabs default to google.com. The home page only applies to the initial browser window/tab. It’s pretty silly.
Because it's probably extremely profitable, unfortunately. I have seen many of my coworkers click on the headlines and ads on the MSN homepage when bored at work.
Internet add networks really lowered the bar for advertising.
Ads on social media, youtube, everywhere seem to be a high % of scams, or weirdly creepy type health products, or creepily manipulative (and ironic) content like "if you're not using my 5 strategies then you're being manipulated".
What is most odd is that I wouldn't mind ads that were for things I want, but nobody seems interested in that angle, they want to just impose their stuff on me.
Every now and then there's a post on Reddit like "I ordered this thing from UNARFI and it is nothing like the pictures" and I'm like, what do you expect when ordering from a site named after an incorrect guess on wordle?
Right, unless we're talking ads for a brand I already know and trust, I just assume that all ads are scams. Even Googles ads, which was previous very good at finding me the products I wanted, from good sources, a now overrun by scams (or borderline scams).
The online adverting industry is raking in billions on scamming people, while providing questionable value for actual good brands. Even if your company is honest and makes good products, you're competing with the scammers for ad space and that pushes up your cost.
I've said this on multiple occasions, but I do not believe that the honest companies are able to fund the tech industry in it's current form. Meta, Google, Apple and everyone else, expects increasing revenue, year on year, most of which is suppose to be delivered by ads, bought by other companies. Those companies just aren't see the same level of growth, nor do they see enough value from ads to increase their advertising. So the big websites take in more and more questionable ads to pad their numbers. So what if consumers get scammed? They should have been more critical.
I'm amazed to discover that there are people on earth that believe that some ads aren't scam. It should be forbidden by law to advertise, it is a scourge on humanity.
Personally I ignore most ads but I have also bought some really good products based on ads and there are companies I wish would advertise more, for example relvant conferences that I only find out about because someone posted about their experiences being there.
I never use Apple News but they often pop up among the apps that are using significant energy. I am wondering what does it really do on the background.
I wasn't sure where I'd seen that "retiring" spiel before, but then I remembered someone was (still is) selling a handmade jewelry website claiming $4.3M revenue and $1.3M profit.
Some of them are funded by scamming others, crypto, VC, etc. Even the first link in the article [0] has a VC backed startup advertising (they paid $11K!) that nobody asked for.
There is no such thing as an ethical ad whatsoever.
We use a PiHole, plus ad-blocking browsers, so we see very few ads. According to Claude, around 40% of users in the West use ad-blockers at least some of the time.
You would think that advertisers would understand that they are killing the goose? They have made ads pervasive, annoying and untrustworthy. Hence, fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with them.
Perhaps enshittification will eventually hit a wall. One can hope.
> around 40% of users in the West use ad-blockers at least some of the time
And doubtless many of them use intentionally use TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc, where "influencers" subtly (or not-so subtly) advertise to them in the native format of the platform.
Oof this is disappointing. Taboola for me represents the worst of the ad industry. Apple falling for it just shows how much of a flop their news app is.
Why would Apple enshittify their News app in this way when there are so many legitimate advertisers out there? It seems obviously damaging to their brand, so it makes no sense to me.
I unsubscribed from the News app subscription over their decision to bake in ads.
I own multiple personal Mac computers, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, iPad Pro, a few HomePods, and a few Apple TV devices. I’ve already proven that I’m willing to pay for a product even when there are cheaper alternatives. Why they decided to make News a paid subscription with ads — especially low-quality ads is beyond me.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve deleted the News, Stocks, and Weather apps, and will just remove any additional apps they decide to chuck in. It’s a real shame their aggressive pursuit of services revenue is destroying what is a great hardware ecosystem.
The stocks app is essentially Apple Business News, with stock prices on one side. I'm not entirely sure how the weather app pushes News on you, but my guess is that it's there somewhere.
my stock app has the Apple business news towards the bottom where it’s pretty easy to ignore and I find it’s at least somewhat relevant, even if I don’t look at it. Even so, totally get it. I don’t really want ads there one way or another.
I don’t see ads on the weather app (at least on my phone)
"Services Revenue must go up! If one ad network pays us 2% more use it!"
-- Tim "Apple" Cook (paraphrased)
Actual quote from a few days ago:
> “Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago [...] a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
My local supermarket advertising on YouTube that they have a sale on coffee this week is pretty legitimate. It just doesn't buy the Alphabet shareholders a new yacht.
I truly don't believe that there is enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News (or elsewhere) to generate to profit Apple expects.
There are enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News to generate ~70% of the profit Apple expects.
Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold.
This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money.
Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.
A lot of that has moved to IG, where you can just follow the stores you're interested in directly. This shift is likely another move that hurt the 'traditional' advertiser pool.
There is a new trick a lot of them are using on YT. Basically it will be a person doing a 'vlog'. But it is mostly just kind of feel good stuff. But in the middle they will mention some product that made whatever they are blathering about feel better with the coinvent link in the description. Then they finish the video.
I have seen a bunch of these. It is a wildly subtle way to get referral points. As the AI part is making it supper easy to mill these things out.
The most wild one I have seen is the 'ai scott adams'. The tone is in the right ballpark. Still a little odd but looking better after their first few attempts. I expect soon it will drop random adverts here and there. With the long con being getting people to watch it, then farm them.
The best are the one trick doctors don’t tell you or the thing THEY don’t want you to know about.
A lot of scams and cons are deliberately stupid looking and absurd to pre-select for gullible marks.
It’s also why goofy conspiritainment shows are loaded with ads for quack medicines. Anyone who thinks we didn’t go to the moon will probably buy herbal dick pills.
I was always a bit confused by the "doctors don't want you to know about" line until I understood that it's in a rather US-centric cultural context where doctors are seen as just wanting your money. Though there's probably also the idea that practitioners of mainstream Western medicine are hostile to "alternative" remedies and don't want you to try the latter even assuming that they're actually effective.
I suppose that, ironically, well-intentioned doctors would indeed prefer that people not know about these "tricks" and other medical scams.
I tried clicking one of those just to see and it didn’t even go to the alleged product but instead a landing page with even more of those ads! Shocking, I know :)
It's the very rare advert that speaks to you, and informs you, and simply makes you aware of its existence without the ridiculous, oversized, plastic cherry on top.
I stopped using it about a year ago and I’m so much better for it. It was shocking that Apple would deliver a feed filled with so much tabloid trash and gross ads about plastic surgery and weight loss. It’s really a gross product.
Surely what they make from these ads is negligible enough to not warrant the terrible user experience for something users pay for. The ads in Apple News are infuriating.
Then what do i move to? No linux laptop feels as good to touch as the aluminum macbooks, and in terms of phones it can't get any worse than the ads-and-trackers shitshow that is android...
Not only that but it's also quite difficult to find a laptop with an ANSI keyboard in an ISO country. My choices are basically an overpriced new Macbook (MacOS is the main con here), an overpriced new Thinkpad (brand new ones are horrible value since it tanks just a year after purchase), a Clevo (much worse build quality and questionable Linux support), or a Framework (worse build quality and mediocre battery life). As much as I hate MacOS, my M1 Macbook is still better at just being a light machine I can take anywhere and be working with immediately, while still lasting over an entire workday regardless of what I do. I really wish that Lenovo would fix their X9 Gen1 Linux support as those laptops are basically what I'd run if I could have proper support.
I know that Windows 11 doesn't get a ton of love on HN, but I have successfully replaced my M1 MacBook Air with a Surface Laptop 7. The build quality is great, and I even think that the Surface's haptic trackpad is superior. However, I don't think anything on the market beats the Macbook's speaker quality.
my goodness we lived with plastic thinkpads for decades and many of us still happily do. this fetish for "premium" hardware to be replaced every two years by the newest hottest thing (if that's not you: great, the planet thanks you) is just plain weird from the outside.
"We" didn't do anything. Nobody is replacing their MacBooks every two years; those machines are tanks and are profoundly overspecced for most users' needs.
I love my plastic ThinkPad, but it's also nice to use good-feeling hardware with a good haptic trackpad. It doesn't need to be replaced every two years. To each their own!
I don't know about you but I really don't want my laptop to be the hottest thing, it sits on my lap.
My thinkpad is from 2017, but I bought it in 2022, it's still working fine - I upgraded the memory to 32G (£70) and I've replaced the battery twice (once when I bought it, once a couple of months ago). When I replace it it will likely be because of hardware failure (droppping it etc).
They'll look good, work well (from hardware perspective), and you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.
By the way, if ultraportable is your idea of laptop nirvana, you can try...
Samsung made awesome AI-powered laptops (the Samsung Galaxy Book5 and Book6), I got the Book5 few months back for my friend's son. It is sleek, lightweight and powerful.
Hi, I'm the person who wrote this article, and I thank whoever posted it here. One comment I'm seeing below is: all ads are scams.
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Ads are capitalist tools to get you to buy things, but in most cases, you get the thing you buy. I'm into photography, books, and music, for example, and the ads I see for cameras aren't scams, nor are ads for books or records. Some of them may attempt to to manipulate you to part with your money, but this sort of scam is different.
One problem with Apple News on the iPad or Mac is the size of the ads. Yes, I notice them and generally scroll past them, but they are huge and obtrusive. I've been noticing these obvious AI ads for a couple of months; especially the one with the mug or the totebags. But they have become endemic recently.
Someone I know said that he assumes all ads on Instagram are scams. I don't use IG, but I do use Facebook to keep up with local groups. There was a period where there were tons of those "going out of business ads," and I reported many of them. But I'd say about half the ads I see now are brands I know. Presumably, since IG uses the same algorithm and personal data, my experience there would be the same.
I think the problem with Apple News is that it's not widely used, and advertisers don't see it as a good place to spend their money. Since Apple started using Taboola, it's pure enshittification.
It's worth noting that in Apple's earnings call last year, they said that their profit margin on services was 78%. While Apple News probably doesn't account for much in that number, it seems like much of the company, as far as services are concerned, is aiming for cash over quality.
I'd agree that ads can be useful for some things. However many major online platforms are flooded with scams to the extent that ads for anything that aren't obvious scams are suspect.
Also there is the converse proposition that: "all clicks are click fraud", that is, many web sites try to trick you into clicking on ads by making pop-ups that are hard to close, by making the layout shift so you click on an ad when you were trying to click a link, etc.
While I understand the sentiment, most ads for a long time were fairly reputable? Like in the news papers, most ads were to make you aware of a brand (next car I buy I'll feel safe buying X because I've seen it in the papers), or to notify you about a local store having a sale etc. And disabling my ad blocker and going to a page I see ads for house listings nearby, offers to buy sports gear in a store in my city, and ads for a well known telecom company. All things I would trust.
What I don't understand is why high-value brands sell their screen estate to straight up scams or low quality ads.
I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.
I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.
It's not the "state of nature", but there's obviously been a lot of litigation and regulation in the meantime. Look up the charmingly named Carbolic Smoke Ball case, for example.
And in your mind NOW always means "since GenAI is a thing"?
Most of the time, when people realize something, it happens NOW. Also, AI isn't even mentioned in the headline at all, and not even in the first part of the article. It's just used as one hint that it might be scam, then followed up with further evidence.
I mean I remember when Penny Arcade Ram ads for games and such and they only ran the ads if the approved of the game. The ads were worth clicking into. They sold a real product for a cost approximating its value.
That could make sense as a criticism if Apple were some tiny struggling company. But they have the resources to do better. And a brand identity that definitely sets it apart from the rest of the internet.
Apple News is a paid subscription. Facebook and Google are not. Apple is supposedly the premium brand that provides a curated experience (isn't that their reasoning behind the closed nature of the App Store?).
Still a bit of a bummer that with Apple, you pay a premium to escape the ad-based ecosystem^W cesspool, both for the hardware and then here for Apple News itself, and then still not only get served ads, but tasteless scam ads.
I’m an Apple cultist but it is somewhat comical that Apple has their own content blocking format built into their own browser but somehow thinks I’d ever want to pay for a subscription to read ad-encumbered news in a separate webview app
Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense.
The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.
It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.
Ever since Apple moved to Services Strategy in 2014 it has been like this. Services were not there so they could provide a better experience for its "customers". I use the word "customer" here which is what Apple / Steve Jobs used to call their loyal fans, and not user. But to further growth their Revenue pie because they foresee iPhone one day will stagnant.
You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.
Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.
Fitness+ is actually super high quality, really well integrated with Apple’s products, and fun to use. I love it. I would happily pay the monthly Apple fee just for fitness+. I hope they don’t change it.
If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.
Over the past decade, there's been a lot of regulation forcing Apple to open up their "Apple only" integrated platforms.
It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated. If it wasn't, you'd go buy a market alternative (Android, PC). In my mind, this means that they spent a lot of time and dev resources (i.e. money) on their Frameworks. I think it showed. Time was spent on design. They focused on opening up capabilities "the right way."
Now that's pointless. If the iPhone is just an Android phone with a different coat of paint, then dev resources are going to be shifted to a place where Apple can distinguish themselves in the market, where they have platforms that they can control: Services.
TV is pretty good even for my English sensibilities. Severance is some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.
I actually like Fitness+, it got me working out for the first time in my life.
Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.
I thought the same until my kids started playing iPad games. Apple Arcade is way better than the baseline of aggressive ads and micro transactions.
Exactly. It's a way to get games that aren't going to immediately ask for other games to be bought or make you watch ridiculous ads to keep playing.
Arcade is amazing for my kids, it’s the one thing that pushes the value of Apple One bundle high enough for me to pay it. I assume all games not in Arcade have gambling mechanics.
The lack of microtransaction/loot box/forced ads/etc driven gameplay is why I keep it. If I can get versions of newer games without all of that cruft, I’m happy. I’m also happy that the game developer gets paid for it.
> You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.
News+ is the only one of these that has poor quality.
Apple Music is extremely good, and pays artists better than many other platforms like Spotify. Unlike Spotify it isn’t enshittifying the product with video and podcast distractions. The software is good quality, native code, not a web wrapper. Plus, there’s a classical music focused version that’s entirely separate.
Fitness+ is a premier product in the space. Have you tried it? The workouts sync with your watch and it has top tier video production quality along with a ton of thought put into accessibility.
Arcade probably does need to have more games added and more attention paid to it, but it’s basically the only place to get mobile games that aren’t stuffed full of gambling mechanics, pay to win, and advertisements.
Apple TV+ is literally the new HBO. They produce some of the most critically acclaimed shows on the planet, and broke the record for number of Emmy nominations by a single studio last year. The software is actually good, which is only really true for TV+ and Netflix. The production values, bitrate, and technology integration (Dolby Atmos/Vision etc) is second to none. MLS coverage by Apple is also top tier, again, with other sports networks regularly mediocre broadcast quality. They’re also getting F1 for US viewers which is almost certainly going to be an improvement over the status quo.
"customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better.
"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.
It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.
I agree that “customer” is a better term. I’m not sure I agree with the rest of the rationale.
In my mind, “user” stated to take over when we started having web based services that were used by people, but they were the ones paying. For example, Google and Facebook. Both got paid through ads, so they advertisers were the customers. The “users” were just the eyeballs the advertisers wanted to reach. So, you had to make your service compelling enough for someone to use for long enough that they’d see enough ads to make it profitable to provide the service.
It’s more akin to talking about “viewers” or “viewership” when talking about more traditional media.
For Apple, they are generally looking to get paid by the ultimate consumer of the product. So to them, we are the customers.
> "It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create."
You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use").
People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not.
Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free.
People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.
In fairness Apple did come up with a custom JSON format for articles:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat
The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow.
They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse.
Contrast with Apple TV+ which has insanely high quality shows. I feel like they arent advertising it enough and investing in it enough. One of my favorite shows that my daughter watches is on Apple TV+ the other on Amazon (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie).
Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.
A clear difference here is that Apple creates the TV+ shows and they don't create the News+ content. And I really don't think they want to get into the news content creation business.
For Apple to really win this space I believe they would need to release a cross platform Publisher tool and complete in the AMP space. Some kind of magazine design / web design software that publishes articles to a standard format and applies a layout over the top. Then the News app becomes a renderer/aggregator that does things better than the standard web browser.
They also bought and killed texture, a fantastic cross-platform magazine subscription service, to somehow further Apple News. I subscribed to Texture on Android. I wouldn't give a dollar to Apple News even if I was in the Apple ecosystem.
At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?
I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint.
It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook.
SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after.
Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined.
It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_University
Steve Jobs was all about the customer experience, hence so many of his famous quotes. Two like the most are:
- Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products
- His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation.
He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it.
As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet.
Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days.
Yes on the last count for Apple U.
The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences.
People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.
Why can't they build their own ad network for control instead of partnering with 3rd parties?
Apple does have their own ad network. This is their ad network.
https://ads.apple.com/
I looked a lot into the "universal paywall" business model where one subscription buys you access to articles from a wide range of news outlets. It's close to impossible to execute because the most prestigious outlets (ahem... The New York Times) won't give you the time of the day, even if you are startup royalty. That Apple has accomplished anything in this space is remarkable.
It's not a revenue generating service.
I ignore Apple News these days. I had high hopes when Apple bought the company that eventually became their News app. Alas…
Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".
90% of the content in the News+ app is itself an ad.
You can definitely block ads- try NextDNS.
We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care. Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection.
When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.
In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
> When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots.
I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me
> http://google.com/ads/preferences
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.
In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.
Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.
But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.
Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.
All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins? The intuitive dynamics to me would be that any way to trick consumers will be applied, and the bulk of the resulting spread will be captured by the ad companies via their auction systems. So we all get worse products with worse deals, and the difference goes into spying on people and convincing them to become more consumptive, i.e. to turn them into worse versions of themselves.
Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.
> Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins?
Because what matters is the total spend per resulting purchase, not total spend per impression.
Because spam ad companies have a very tiny conversion rate, they can only pay a very small amount per impression before it becomes unprofitable.
Legitimate companies aren't usually trying to completely trick their customers. They are selling an actual decent or good quality product.
This sounds brilliant, makes too much sense, and suggests a new kind of ad blocker to escalate and reflect retribution back.
Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
The random-clickers have been around for a while, clicking through ads to try to break profiles on users and cost the ad networks more money than it is worth.
They have not been very successful in their goals. I suspect, without sarcasm, that that is because compared to the absolutely routine click-fraud conducted up and down the entire ad space at every level, those plugin's effects literally didn't even register. It's an arms race and people trying to use ad blockers to not just block the ads but corrupt them are coming armed with a pea shooter to an artillery fight, not because they are not very clever themselves but just without a lot of users they can't even get the needle to twitch.
Alternative POV: the better they profile, you the better they can slip the scams past your defenses
I consider even "legitimate" ads scams. My products are more expensive (the marketing budget doesn't fall out of the sky, after all), and I am rewarded by being forced to view extremely annoying content in my day-to-day life? As a consumer, that sounds like a horrible deal to me!
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
It might be more pleasant for the people who are able to pay for every website, every magazine, every news source etc. (Maybe. I do discover a lot of things through advertising.) Probably less so for everyone else.
Such a terrible take...
> We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care.
Completely agree.
> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.
Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.
You could read obvious shilling here pretending to like or pay and use the boringest B2B SaaS products way back too.
Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.
HN has been overwhelmingly astroturfed since at least 2010.
The only way out of this is to make ad platforms liable for scam ads. At the moment it's simply too profitable to print lies.
Kids today learning about the FTC and standards... we used to be a real country, with real laws that actually helped real people.
Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts.
If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.
And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.
You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
I can't say the AI scripted AI voiced "my wife bet my abs vs. a trip to Paris" and "I ordered this and was going to throw it away but then the heavens opened and angels descended and gave me this Alibaba tchotchke" are harbingers of the idiocracy. Because it's already here.
// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
> maybe trusted communities like HN
Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all.
My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.
That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not.
Maybe they would have done that anyway though.
There’s plenty of scams on HN, people don’t notice the successful ones
In practice I mostly ignore ads too but it feels like an ecosystem-level tragedy
> maybe trusted communities like HN
Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
I'd generalize it to "I assume all ads on major platforms are scam." This includes especially channels owned by Google and Meta.
I remember back in 2010 I had to wait a week and correct my ad before it was approved and now they basically stream all kinds of scams without checking. They do have quite a few people, they could build a better scam detection system but it's against their interests.
What's annoying is they do have tons of scam detection crap, which seems to only trigger on legitimate advertising (insofar as any advertising is legitimate) - the problem is there are millions of people willing to work on getting scams through for pennies a day, and it doesn't cost them anything.
I don’t know if it is just a symptom of growing up during the days of the net’s Wild West and navigating through sites like gamecopyworld or what, but I just seem to have some inbuilt filter which doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of ads.
It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.
I do not have that filter, but I have been using ad blockers for so long that my tolerance for ads is near zero. Being interrupted by an ad is enough for me to close the tab or turn the device off.
I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.
Visiting friends/family sometimes I have to ask for the TV to be turned off so we can talk and visit. Not to make some sort of statement or signal my dislike for the content, but to stop having my attention grabbed over and over for useless dribble/ads. They do not understand how horribly distracting it is to someone who isn't numbed to its omnipresence.
It’s horrible on mobile. Sites like macobserver are bad. Two videos overlapping, popping in and out, shifting content.
There are really good ad blockers on mobile these days. I use AdGuard for Safari and it's as good as uBlock on desktop Firefox.
I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.
I also use adblock and what ends up happening as a consequence is the ads I do see are the shittiest of shitty ads that don't even come from a recognized network. :)
Possibly an instance of banner blindness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
Who doesn't think this about themselves. It's like when people say they're immune to propaganda. Isn't this thinking what makes people think their smart devices are listening to conversations rather than targeted ads you only notice after it's had the effect on you.
Same here. What's worse is that some pages "highlight" content in a similar fashion to an ad in the middle and I'm a bit unaware of that content. Only when something doesn't add up I'll scroll back and see the missing content.
Gamecopyworld… now there’s a name I have not heard in a long time.
I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.
just made me flashback to a url bar and typing that too long of a url
For me, it depends on how well-disguised the ad is. Ads quietly sitting there, informing? Those I blank out. The big flashy animations? Those make me switch to reader mode, or leave the domain entirely.
I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.
I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).
I think a lot of people who grew up on the early web have that reflex
I bought a remarkably similar mug (last advert shown) from an add from different site [1]. Everything about it was a fake. Almost every feature they advertised did not exist (including the fact that it did not come in a gift box.) That was from a site I visit a lot and I wanted to show support. BTW the AI generated animation is quite cool, too bad it is not real...
Do not buy this!! [1] https://kenmiso.com/products/%E2%9A%A1%E2%9C%A8ultimate-v8-e...
I am surprised you could look at that page and expect to receive a quality product. The images all look like really low grade AI-generated renderings. The mug in the cupholder and the giftbox image in particular don't stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Not trying to make your situation worse, I just find it interesting what these sites are able to get away with to get people to part with their money.
Just as there's a cottage industry for "I made the game the scam ads show" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRDhiN50Vo0 I think there will soon be a cottage industry for "the scam ad was good, let's make it for real".
That mug is amusing but it should't be too hard for China to make something similar - but real (at least without the weird piston).
Are you saying that something about this product is suspect? But it has "Beautiful Craftsamnship"!
https://img-va.myshopline.com/image/store/1731468034215/1dd4...
> interlocking ars
OwO
Maggie Mcguagh on Instagram's whole schtick is buying and reviewing these fake AI generated products. Its pretty hilarious
[1]https://www.instagram.com/maggiemcgaugh
Wtf. How could you fall for such an obvious scam? Are you under 5 years old? Or over 60?
I am very curious what the product really looked like.
so you're saying this is a real product and the ad you saw(then purchased from) was a fake?
The weird thing about Apple News: as the article mentions, paying for “+” still shows ads, but not paying at all means you can’t see content that’s already free online.
Try it: when it tells you a story isn’t available without a subscription, search the headline and often the story can be read on its original source, for free.
I Assume That All Ads Are Scams
Like a cancer, a publicly traded company must grow at any cost.
I love how, on the "I am retiring page", the image of the old woman even has artifacts of the Gemini logo on the bottom right - someone very probably manually tried to blur them with a tool that was not meant for blurring.
Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.
Because the sets of people who would give money to this and people who notice the Gemini logo are disjoint.
Yeah it was always a trick scammers used. Scam emails (the more obvious ones - not sophisticated phising) always had typos or subtle grammar errors because authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes. It's the people that do not read thoroughly that are much more likely to fall for a scam.
I would imagine it might be the same with those ads.
> authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes
This "just-so" story gets repeated constantly in threads about scams, but I've never seen anyone put up any actual proof. The more likely explanation is that scammers are just bad at English since they're predominantly from poor third-world countries.
Spelling and grammar checkers are free; online translators have been better than that for many years now.
It could be sloppiness, but I think scammers just organically copied efforts that worked, and those were the ones with poor presentations because they pre-filter and so target the scammers efforts more efficiently. The scammers need not be aware of why it works.
This is research from Microsoft that goes into more detail: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
I skimmed the pdf; they show a model where having such an early "filter" is beneficial to the scammer, but doesn't provide any actual evidence that it applies in reality beyond restating the just-so story.
> Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.
It is intentional. People who will not notice, are the least likely to complain later.
Do you know why all these “Nigerian prince” emails are of a very specific style?
You're famous now. The author noticed your comment and updated the article pointing it out.
It actually says "L am retiring". Maybe a 419 scam kinda thing, the intentional typos.
The more you pay for a subscription, the more valuable it is to advertise to you -- maybe the classic example is The New York Times which has highly annoying advertising if you're a subscriber because you've qualified yourself.
Or rather, if you believe you are too poor to afford a $10 a month subscription you probably believe you're too poor to afford anything that is advertised. The model of "premium subscription with no ads" flies in the face of reality.
I would be willing to consider paying for vetted ads - in other words, you pay for the NYT and you get a guarantee that you're only seeing ads that have been personally vetted by the NYT for correctness, appropriateness, etc.
Advertising is speech and it used to be that if a magazine/newspaper printed a scam ad, it was horribly damaging to their business, both legally and morally.
What's the user appeal of Apple news or whatever the Google equivalent is? From the outside looking in the value is the feed, but that seems super creepy to me.
It is an awful lot of power to give these companies to decide how we use their devices to interact with the world _and_ how we view the world.
I don't want anyone curating the current events or long-form I read. I want to see the whole buffet and choose myself, even sampling the unsavory ones from time-to-time to keep myself in check.
Huh? With millions of pieces of content to choose from a day some kind of curation is inevitable.
I've an avid Apple News user, and while I haven't seen the sorts of ads in the article, I do gets lots of ads for tax filing software. Namely, Intuit TurboTax. They are the only ads I ever get.
What's more, if you even touch them while scrolling, it triggers the "download app" screen, even if I don't explicitly tap. This is new as of a few weeks ago.
I'm genuinely haunted by these TurboTax ads, I see that download app popup at least 3 times a day when I use Apple News. Truly cannot believe someone at Apple though that was an acceptable user experience for ads.
The era of Tim Apple is definitely different from Jobs; had he seen an ad like that he'd have fired half the company.
But management by metrics means line go up? All is good.
A trusted company works with untrustworthy companies to scam clients.
That's either incompetence or betrayal of trust. In both cases, the only solution is to be careful, boycott and press charges when something is illegal.
I just want to use this space to say that I hate the fake AI-generated ripped tai-chi guy from the Youtube ads SO MUCH.
I've noticed that the apple news ads target sensitive issues. The retirement one is a good example of that. I've seen ads that appear to already know my financial status and health conditions. I tried the option to reset my advertising identifier, it doesn't seem to make much impact.
I prefer these types of ads. They're easy to identify at a glance and ignore.
I do have a similar feeling, but about YouTube ads. Seems like the region where I live there's a problem with gambling apps and, even if I've never used any app of this kind or showed interest in gambling sites/platforms, I'm bombarded everyday by ads of gambling apps on YouTube.
Since last year, I've been reporting every gambling ad as "Promoting illegal product/service" (they are, in fact, illegal here) to no avail, there's no end to these ads nor seems like YouTube is willing to do anything but implement dark patterns to discourage reporting, such as delayed pop-ups when reporting to interrupt typing.
I noticed some time ago that others ads that seemed not related to gambling were also leading to gambling apps. They are categorized as anything, like Hotels, Banking, Cullinary and Education. Don't look like YouTube checks if the things being advertised are really what they claim to be. It's worse when you remember that kids also use YouTube a lot.
Dear Tim Apple: you don’t need the tiny amount you get these ads. You do need to fix this embarrassing thing that you released called “Liquid Glass”
Sadly we are going to get more ads (Apple Maps is next). If it goes much further people will start questioning whether Apple products are worth the premium price.
All ads are scams. Some are worse than others.
In the 1980's TV ads in Uruguay were really simple. Some were just a static bi-colour image of a shoe or a coat, some text, and a voice would say "buy shoes at such shop at such address".
I guess that was at the same time the low point of marketing and also its most honest stage.
Don’t make me tap the “ads are cancer” sign.
It’s a bit like that MSN page what MS is forcing on millions through Edge and W11 widgets
On top of that, that thing takes a bunch of fiddling in their own GUI to disable. I want a search bar for my home page. Nothing else. Then every once and awhile it will 'forget' its settings and put it all back. Edge/Chrome makes no difference to me it is the same code. But that first tab experience with edge is garbage. Probably why I mostly use Firefox still.
I just use “New Tab Redirect” in Chrome so I can make new tabs default to google.com. The home page only applies to the initial browser window/tab. It’s pretty silly.
The "ever changing/enshittifying Edge" was the final nail in the coffin on Windows for me...that made me to change to MacOS for good.
Why does it even exist, this MSN page, which is ridden with nonsense...? I don't get it.
Because it's probably extremely profitable, unfortunately. I have seen many of my coworkers click on the headlines and ads on the MSN homepage when bored at work.
It's even on the base install of Windows Server. Fuck off Microsoft.
At least one can quicly hide that filth. Unbearable, in every language...
Internet add networks really lowered the bar for advertising.
Ads on social media, youtube, everywhere seem to be a high % of scams, or weirdly creepy type health products, or creepily manipulative (and ironic) content like "if you're not using my 5 strategies then you're being manipulated".
What is most odd is that I wouldn't mind ads that were for things I want, but nobody seems interested in that angle, they want to just impose their stuff on me.
Please condense all spread out comments "all ads are scam" into one single comment thread.
ChatGPT: (sponsored) Buy this cute mug in the shape of a purse with AI created pictures of a dog! Just $19.99 (at 80% discount)
I assume all social media ads are also scams.
Every now and then there's a post on Reddit like "I ordered this thing from UNARFI and it is nothing like the pictures" and I'm like, what do you expect when ordering from a site named after an incorrect guess on wordle?
Right, unless we're talking ads for a brand I already know and trust, I just assume that all ads are scams. Even Googles ads, which was previous very good at finding me the products I wanted, from good sources, a now overrun by scams (or borderline scams).
The online adverting industry is raking in billions on scamming people, while providing questionable value for actual good brands. Even if your company is honest and makes good products, you're competing with the scammers for ad space and that pushes up your cost.
I've said this on multiple occasions, but I do not believe that the honest companies are able to fund the tech industry in it's current form. Meta, Google, Apple and everyone else, expects increasing revenue, year on year, most of which is suppose to be delivered by ads, bought by other companies. Those companies just aren't see the same level of growth, nor do they see enough value from ads to increase their advertising. So the big websites take in more and more questionable ads to pad their numbers. So what if consumers get scammed? They should have been more critical.
I'm amazed to discover that there are people on earth that believe that some ads aren't scam. It should be forbidden by law to advertise, it is a scourge on humanity.
Personally I ignore most ads but I have also bought some really good products based on ads and there are companies I wish would advertise more, for example relvant conferences that I only find out about because someone posted about their experiences being there.
I agree.
I clicked on the daring fireball link and immediately saw an intrusive ad.
They are just everywhere, the web was never like this in the beginning.
A complete scourge.
The financial optimum for any ad company is to accommodate scams.
I never use Apple News but they often pop up among the apps that are using significant energy. I am wondering what does it really do on the background.
Which is why I never us a phone that requires me to have certain apps installed.
Personally I assume ALL ads are scams. Never mind where they are from.
Very witty
I wasn't sure where I'd seen that "retiring" spiel before, but then I remembered someone was (still is) selling a handmade jewelry website claiming $4.3M revenue and $1.3M profit.
Just assume all ads everywhere are scams, it’s an accurate enough heuristic
You should assume all ads are complete scams.
Some of them are funded by scamming others, crypto, VC, etc. Even the first link in the article [0] has a VC backed startup advertising (they paid $11K!) that nobody asked for.
There is no such thing as an ethical ad whatsoever.
[0] https://daringfireball.net/2024/07/apple_taboola_sitting_in_...
The depressing part is that this is probably working just well enough financially
We use a PiHole, plus ad-blocking browsers, so we see very few ads. According to Claude, around 40% of users in the West use ad-blockers at least some of the time.
You would think that advertisers would understand that they are killing the goose? They have made ads pervasive, annoying and untrustworthy. Hence, fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with them.
Perhaps enshittification will eventually hit a wall. One can hope.
> around 40% of users in the West use ad-blockers at least some of the time
And doubtless many of them use intentionally use TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc, where "influencers" subtly (or not-so subtly) advertise to them in the native format of the platform.
Thankfully at least for YouTube there's Sponsorblock to filter out that junk as well.
Oof this is disappointing. Taboola for me represents the worst of the ad industry. Apple falling for it just shows how much of a flop their news app is.
All ads are scams.
Why would Apple enshittify their News app in this way when there are so many legitimate advertisers out there? It seems obviously damaging to their brand, so it makes no sense to me.
I unsubscribed from the News app subscription over their decision to bake in ads.
I own multiple personal Mac computers, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, iPad Pro, a few HomePods, and a few Apple TV devices. I’ve already proven that I’m willing to pay for a product even when there are cheaper alternatives. Why they decided to make News a paid subscription with ads — especially low-quality ads is beyond me.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve deleted the News, Stocks, and Weather apps, and will just remove any additional apps they decide to chuck in. It’s a real shame their aggressive pursuit of services revenue is destroying what is a great hardware ecosystem.
What’s wrong with the weather and stocks apps? Maybe a silly question.
The stocks app is essentially Apple Business News, with stock prices on one side. I'm not entirely sure how the weather app pushes News on you, but my guess is that it's there somewhere.
I quite like the weather app on my laptop. Not seen any ads or news in it yet.
my stock app has the Apple business news towards the bottom where it’s pretty easy to ignore and I find it’s at least somewhat relevant, even if I don’t look at it. Even so, totally get it. I don’t really want ads there one way or another.
I don’t see ads on the weather app (at least on my phone)
"Services Revenue must go up! If one ad network pays us 2% more use it!"
-- Tim "Apple" Cook (paraphrased)
Actual quote from a few days ago:
> “Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago [...] a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
I’m kind of (un)surprised to see it just be Taboola’s slop from the ages past. I forgot Taboola even still pushes that garbage.
> legitimate advertisers
Those two words definitely don't belong together.
My local supermarket advertising on YouTube that they have a sale on coffee this week is pretty legitimate. It just doesn't buy the Alphabet shareholders a new yacht.
I truly don't believe that there is enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News (or elsewhere) to generate to profit Apple expects.
There are enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News to generate ~70% of the profit Apple expects.
Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold.
This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money.
Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.
A lot of that has moved to IG, where you can just follow the stores you're interested in directly. This shift is likely another move that hurt the 'traditional' advertiser pool.
This is true of all news sites, some hearing aid, you wont believe, why your pet does X etc etc
There is a new trick a lot of them are using on YT. Basically it will be a person doing a 'vlog'. But it is mostly just kind of feel good stuff. But in the middle they will mention some product that made whatever they are blathering about feel better with the coinvent link in the description. Then they finish the video.
I have seen a bunch of these. It is a wildly subtle way to get referral points. As the AI part is making it supper easy to mill these things out.
The most wild one I have seen is the 'ai scott adams'. The tone is in the right ballpark. Still a little odd but looking better after their first few attempts. I expect soon it will drop random adverts here and there. With the long con being getting people to watch it, then farm them.
The best are the one trick doctors don’t tell you or the thing THEY don’t want you to know about.
A lot of scams and cons are deliberately stupid looking and absurd to pre-select for gullible marks.
It’s also why goofy conspiritainment shows are loaded with ads for quack medicines. Anyone who thinks we didn’t go to the moon will probably buy herbal dick pills.
I was always a bit confused by the "doctors don't want you to know about" line until I understood that it's in a rather US-centric cultural context where doctors are seen as just wanting your money. Though there's probably also the idea that practitioners of mainstream Western medicine are hostile to "alternative" remedies and don't want you to try the latter even assuming that they're actually effective.
I suppose that, ironically, well-intentioned doctors would indeed prefer that people not know about these "tricks" and other medical scams.
I tried clicking one of those just to see and it didn’t even go to the alleged product but instead a landing page with even more of those ads! Shocking, I know :)
I wonder how many of them are basically click fraud to get money from ad networks.
Well, most ads are.
It's the very rare advert that speaks to you, and informs you, and simply makes you aware of its existence without the ridiculous, oversized, plastic cherry on top.
I stopped using it about a year ago and I’m so much better for it. It was shocking that Apple would deliver a feed filled with so much tabloid trash and gross ads about plastic surgery and weight loss. It’s really a gross product.
Surely what they make from these ads is negligible enough to not warrant the terrible user experience for something users pay for. The ads in Apple News are infuriating.
At this stage pretty much all ads on the internet are scams
Probably simpler to assume all ads are scams and work back from there
All ads are scams. They are there to make you unhappy causing you to need to work/spend money to become happy again.
Anyone who pays $1000 dollars for a phone has already been scammed once, so they make a good target for scammers.
Mark my words, Apple is going to go full enshittification in the next 5 years because they've squeezed every last drop out of hardware pricing.
Especially with the failed Apple Intelligence that they will now have to pay their way out of.
Then what do i move to? No linux laptop feels as good to touch as the aluminum macbooks, and in terms of phones it can't get any worse than the ads-and-trackers shitshow that is android...
Not only that but it's also quite difficult to find a laptop with an ANSI keyboard in an ISO country. My choices are basically an overpriced new Macbook (MacOS is the main con here), an overpriced new Thinkpad (brand new ones are horrible value since it tanks just a year after purchase), a Clevo (much worse build quality and questionable Linux support), or a Framework (worse build quality and mediocre battery life). As much as I hate MacOS, my M1 Macbook is still better at just being a light machine I can take anywhere and be working with immediately, while still lasting over an entire workday regardless of what I do. I really wish that Lenovo would fix their X9 Gen1 Linux support as those laptops are basically what I'd run if I could have proper support.
I know that Windows 11 doesn't get a ton of love on HN, but I have successfully replaced my M1 MacBook Air with a Surface Laptop 7. The build quality is great, and I even think that the Surface's haptic trackpad is superior. However, I don't think anything on the market beats the Macbook's speaker quality.
Just put Linux on that Microsoft laptop, LOL. Problem solved and it will work great.
my goodness we lived with plastic thinkpads for decades and many of us still happily do. this fetish for "premium" hardware to be replaced every two years by the newest hottest thing (if that's not you: great, the planet thanks you) is just plain weird from the outside.
"We" didn't do anything. Nobody is replacing their MacBooks every two years; those machines are tanks and are profoundly overspecced for most users' needs.
My last MacBook lasted me from 2015-2025. It's still running actually, just getting slow.
you just gotta know when to stop updating OS and macbooks will last a loooong time
I love my plastic ThinkPad, but it's also nice to use good-feeling hardware with a good haptic trackpad. It doesn't need to be replaced every two years. To each their own!
I don't know about you but I really don't want my laptop to be the hottest thing, it sits on my lap.
My thinkpad is from 2017, but I bought it in 2022, it's still working fine - I upgraded the memory to 32G (£70) and I've replaced the battery twice (once when I bought it, once a couple of months ago). When I replace it it will likely be because of hardware failure (droppping it etc).
Get any gaming laptop or corporate grade laptop.
They'll look good, work well (from hardware perspective), and you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.
By the way, if ultraportable is your idea of laptop nirvana, you can try... Samsung made awesome AI-powered laptops (the Samsung Galaxy Book5 and Book6), I got the Book5 few months back for my friend's son. It is sleek, lightweight and powerful.
Here is the TG review/verdict: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/samsung-galaxy-b...
Vote with your wallet and buy an Android phone without ads and trackers? What is this FUD?
A phone is a poor replacement for a laptop.
Buy a phone from an ad supported company to get away from ads?
But these are just the same ads as on Google and everywhere else. Almost all internet ads are scam nowadays.
Doesn't make it any better.
what about the #1 result in any research in Apple store
100% shit
Hi, I'm the person who wrote this article, and I thank whoever posted it here. One comment I'm seeing below is: all ads are scams.
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Ads are capitalist tools to get you to buy things, but in most cases, you get the thing you buy. I'm into photography, books, and music, for example, and the ads I see for cameras aren't scams, nor are ads for books or records. Some of them may attempt to to manipulate you to part with your money, but this sort of scam is different.
One problem with Apple News on the iPad or Mac is the size of the ads. Yes, I notice them and generally scroll past them, but they are huge and obtrusive. I've been noticing these obvious AI ads for a couple of months; especially the one with the mug or the totebags. But they have become endemic recently.
Someone I know said that he assumes all ads on Instagram are scams. I don't use IG, but I do use Facebook to keep up with local groups. There was a period where there were tons of those "going out of business ads," and I reported many of them. But I'd say about half the ads I see now are brands I know. Presumably, since IG uses the same algorithm and personal data, my experience there would be the same.
I think the problem with Apple News is that it's not widely used, and advertisers don't see it as a good place to spend their money. Since Apple started using Taboola, it's pure enshittification.
It's worth noting that in Apple's earnings call last year, they said that their profit margin on services was 78%. While Apple News probably doesn't account for much in that number, it seems like much of the company, as far as services are concerned, is aiming for cash over quality.
I'd agree that ads can be useful for some things. However many major online platforms are flooded with scams to the extent that ads for anything that aren't obvious scams are suspect.
Also there is the converse proposition that: "all clicks are click fraud", that is, many web sites try to trick you into clicking on ads by making pop-ups that are hard to close, by making the layout shift so you click on an ad when you were trying to click a link, etc.
This is a bit silly. Are there any ads that people do trust?
While I understand the sentiment, most ads for a long time were fairly reputable? Like in the news papers, most ads were to make you aware of a brand (next car I buy I'll feel safe buying X because I've seen it in the papers), or to notify you about a local store having a sale etc. And disabling my ad blocker and going to a page I see ads for house listings nearby, offers to buy sports gear in a store in my city, and ads for a well known telecom company. All things I would trust.
What I don't understand is why high-value brands sell their screen estate to straight up scams or low quality ads.
I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.
I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.
It's not the "state of nature", but there's obviously been a lot of litigation and regulation in the meantime. Look up the charmingly named Carbolic Smoke Ball case, for example.
Exactly. Why did the article author think ads weren't scams before they were "AI" generated?
Where does the author claim or even remotely suggest that?
They only NOW assume all ads are scams. Suggests they didn't make that assumption before, doesn't it?
And in your mind NOW always means "since GenAI is a thing"?
Most of the time, when people realize something, it happens NOW. Also, AI isn't even mentioned in the headline at all, and not even in the first part of the article. It's just used as one hint that it might be scam, then followed up with further evidence.
In the headline - the word Now implies "Ads before weren't scams but they are now"
And where in the headline is "AI"?
"Here are three ads that are scammy; the first two were clearly generated by AI, and the third may have been created by AI."
The "AI" evangelists are trying to explain to us that all ads are to be trusted because they're "AI" generated now...
I see an ad for a product I bought and it makes me worried I got scammed. The usual offender is Peak Design.
Yes, of course. These exist because they work. If no one fell for these scams, they wouldn’t continue to exist.
I mean I remember when Penny Arcade Ram ads for games and such and they only ran the ads if the approved of the game. The ads were worth clicking into. They sold a real product for a cost approximating its value.
Now ads are just scams
> Are there any ads that people do trust?
What? Yes, of course. Are you so terminally online that you assume all advertising is the fake AI chum that we see on the web?
Even online I get a lot of ads for goods/services I do use, or could see myself using.
HN users are mostly 1980s levels of institutional and media trust. Not sure why.
Nice - Another post shaming Apple for a problem which the entire internet faces.
I'll load up Facebook right now and get the same things. Google? The same.
And to no surprise, ads like these break Apple's ad content guidelines[1].
OP should figuratively put down the video camera and go perform CPR. Report the Ad. Make the internet a better place.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/adguide/apd527d891a8/1...
That could make sense as a criticism if Apple were some tiny struggling company. But they have the resources to do better. And a brand identity that definitely sets it apart from the rest of the internet.
Apple News is a paid subscription. Facebook and Google are not. Apple is supposedly the premium brand that provides a curated experience (isn't that their reasoning behind the closed nature of the App Store?).
Still a bit of a bummer that with Apple, you pay a premium to escape the ad-based ecosystem^W cesspool, both for the hardware and then here for Apple News itself, and then still not only get served ads, but tasteless scam ads.
I’m an Apple cultist but it is somewhat comical that Apple has their own content blocking format built into their own browser but somehow thinks I’d ever want to pay for a subscription to read ad-encumbered news in a separate webview app