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You Might Also Like

• shuntress 4y ago
  Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad. Spam is bad. Being overrun by low quality ads is bad. I don't mind ads when its GOOD advertising.
  • juliushuijnk 4y ago
    Funny, I rather have bad ads that fail to influence me.
  • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    Advertising isn't neutral. It defaults to bad. It is, by its nature, a distraction. It makes the world worse. It incentivizes a business model where you attract people's attention by any means necessary and then sell off that attention. Sometimes advertising turns out to be helpful. Sometimes you learn about something that you wouldn't have known to look for that you really care about. Sometimes you're looking for something and find out there's a cheaper competitor product that's perfect for your needs. Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. A giant Pepsi billboard is not making anybody's life better in any way.
    • shuntress 4y ago
      > Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. This is my point. Advertising is not inherently bad. To explain that further for the back of the class, advertising is not inherently good. Advertising can be GOOD OR BAD.
      • bombcar 4y ago
        I think it general we can say "advertising is not wanted" - bar exceptional side cases like the Super Bowl ads, very few people seek out the advertising that costs big money. I love catalogs from the companies I buy from, and I love their websites, but those are marketing not advertising. The vast majority of advertising is at best a "necessary bad" (not per se evil, perhaps).
        • shuntress 4y ago
          I think in general we can say "BAD advertising is not wanted". Good advertising (like, for example, catalogues from the companies you love and buy from) is, in general, desirable.
          • bombcar 4y ago
            It's probably not at all the "industry" terms, but I would divide "push advertising" (TV, radio, web ads, blah blah blah) from "pull advertising" (going to the company website, asking for the catalog, etc). What is sad is how "push advertising" can become something actually desired - once you buy into a luxury brand, for example, you WANT advertising that reinforces just how good and sexy you are for having bought product.
          • nehal3m 4y ago
            Found the advertiser.
          • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
            Companies intensely track the percentage of catalogs mailed out that result in an order. They call this number the "order rate," and it's a very important stat for catalogs. You know what's generally seen as a very good order rate? Two percent. Even within that genre, actually deriving any enjoyment or finding a useful product is the exception rather than the rule, and in a time when anyone who wants to see what that company has to offer can check the website, they're effectively useless now. There are a very small number of catalogs that people are excited to get because the contents are neat. The Sears Holiday Wishbook. Hobbyist magazines. Insane ads for 3D glasses and plans to convert a vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft in Boy Scout magazines. But these are needles in a haystack of recycled paper.
      • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
        Eh, I guess it really depends on how you define "inherently bad." For example, I'd also call "shooting people" inherently bad, but there are certainly cases where a specific shooting is a net good (self defense, etc). It sounds like your definition is different and may require any possible instance to be bad.
        • shuntress 4y ago
          We could spend all day spinning our wheels on increasingly pedantic hypotheticals but it's not exactly productive discussion. Non-consensual acts of violence are always inherently bad even when they are "provoked" by reprehensible acts (three rights make a left and all that). "shooting people" with X-Rays to image their internal structures for medical purposes is generally accepted to be good.
          • santoshalper 4y ago
            Yes, and I'd say the same thing about advertising, though obviously on a lesser scale. All advertising is bad. Some advertising is merely less bad. Advertising that appears in Apps or Software I paid for is hot garbage 100% of the time.
        • shkkmo 4y ago
          By your own argument and definition, advertising is inherently bad: Advertising being good is a edge case that requires specific circumstances.
          • SuperCuber 4y ago
            I'm pretty sure that is the point GP was trying to make
  • ketralnis 4y ago
    > Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad. I don't agree. I don't want to convince you or change your mind but I believe that most advertising is default immoral with few exceptions. Of course feeling that way myself I believe that it's a valid point of view, and I do make purchasing decisions based on it. In line with the article's thesis: > feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product merely for a bit more money I too am surprised that as little as this revenue can be in relation to the hardware and app store revenue that they're leaning into it this hard.
    • shuntress 4y ago
      I would agree with you that "most advertising" (your words) is currently immoral in that it tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed. Or: *Spam* But I don't think that is due to advertising in general being "default immoral". There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something. As an aside: Accepting money in exchange for promotion without making it clear that you have been paid is certainly immoral.
      • ketralnis 4y ago
        > tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed I don't think bad products are immoral, just bad. > There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something. There's a difference between _paying to get something_, and _paying me to do something_. For instance, we can probably agree that paying to receive a stolen television and paying me to build you a television are different even if the buyer-side transaction characteristics are the same. That's where advertising breaks down in morality. When party A pays party B to receive party C's attention without party C agreeing to be a part of this transaction at all. That's why I say "most": sometimes party C is in fact knowingly participating. Maybe they get something in exchange for their attention (access to a costly-to-run website, or a reduced rate on an otherwise costly-to-print magazine). Obviously that line is fuzzy for something like the App Store where the money is going to Apple's margins which are kinda sorta part of the product pricing but clearly the price of the hardware isn't going down but Apple's clearly within their rights to set their own pricing and...? It's fuzzy for sure but I sure didn't knowingly agree to be advertised to on a device that I bought before they started doing this. And consent is hard to talk about in a duopoly environment as well. Anyway again I'm not here to argue with you about it and I don't care one way or the other if you agree with me. I just wanted to point out that your axioms about "fundamentally immoral" aren't everybody's axioms.
  • technoooooost 4y ago
    Is this a way of rationalizing your adtech position?
  • zaik 4y ago
    Don't worry, we know exactly what products you might like.
  • frosted-flakes 4y ago
    I don't mind magazine advertising, because those are hyper-specific to the topic you're actually interested in, because you bought a magazine all about it. If I'm reading a woodworking magazine and I see an ad for a new type of clamp or jig a company is advertising, yeah I'm interested! (Free "magazines" are trash, I'm talking about Fine Homebuilding, Ontario Out of Doors, etc.) Online advertising is almost universally trash for me, and I'm not sure I've ever spent a cent because of it. It's always useless and irrelevant (no I don't need a car, or lipstick, alcohol, or iced tea, I'm super not interested in any of those). And yet, someone must be clicking those ads. I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products, and I was floored! Who clicks ads?!
    • shuntress 4y ago
      I don't understand what point you are trying to make. Are you just trying to say that advertising only exists because "women be shopping"?
      • frosted-flakes 4y ago
        I don't understand your comment. Where did I say that? My point is that I don't mind magazine advertising because it's hyper-specific to a topic I actively wanted to read, but online advertising is so random that none of it is ever relevant.
        • shuntress 4y ago
          > I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products So, you would agree then that when the content and relevance of an ad surpasses some threshold, the ad is good and that when ads are "useless and irrelevant" they are bad?
  • boxed 4y ago
    Ads on A PAGE FOR A SPECIFIC APP in the damn store is 100% super bad and evil. Apple should be ashamed.
  • mrkeen 4y ago
    What would you pay to see a GOOD ad?
  • rchaud 4y ago
    There is no such thing as 'good advertising', least of all on a mobile platform that has to fit the maximum possible ads into a small phone screen viewport. As a child, I remember very creative ads for Smirnoff vodka; those would not be possible today because marketing budgets simply see more ROI in targeted advertising, which tends to be bland text search ads or ugly display ads like this. The days of Mad Men style aspirational, full-page, high production quality ads are gone, thanks to Real Time Bidding ad networks that made Google and Facebook their fortune. We've been living in the RTB world for close to 20 years.
  • aussieshibe 4y ago
    Nothing is "inherently or automatically bad". Good and bad are matters of opinion, not fact. In my opinion, all ads are bad, and the world would be a better place if advertising were strictly limited to publishing product details in some kind of directory (think along the lines of a phone book).
  • imoreno 4y ago
    This. Advertising is a fair idea in principle. When you make a new company that truly revolutionizes a product or service, people won't magically find out about it overnight. Word of mouth takes time. As a customer, I don't want to wait years for a good product to get memed before I find out about it. I want to know right away! But the ads are never for revolutionary products that just came out, that I would love to buy. They're always for crap I would never pay for in a million years. I know there's all the studies about mere exposure effect and what not. Yaawn. It seems like the dominant paradigm by far is that no matter how shitty your product, no matter how much you hate your customers (and vice versa), you can just nag them into buying it with enough saturation marketing. I don't get how people just accept this uncritically as a law of nature. Why can't the ads be for quality stuff that people actually care about? Everyone's so obsessed with tracking every aspect of my life, so how come they just show the same slot app ad to every single person regardless, even if I've never shown interest in anything similar in a million years? I remember back in the 90s-ternet, I would get lots of relevant ads for products, sites relevant to me. I loved looking at and clicking at ads, since they made me discover companies that I enjoyed for years after. I don't think they did any of this modern analytics stuff, they probably just had some guy with a good intuitive understanding of a site's userbase and what they care about go on his gut feeling. Maybe we should go back.
  • w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
    Browndo, the thirst mutilator... Have a look at Idiocracy to have an idea of how wrong ads can be.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  Until they make ads an OS-level feature, this doesn't bother me on a practical level, because I don't use any first party apps of theirs. I'm thinking about how this affects, me, and I don't think I use any Apple apps on a daily basis. I guess I never thought about how none of the best apps (imho) in any category I use on iOS are made by Apple. I agree with the premise of the article, but I can work around this phase of Apple's heel turn.
• nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • shmde 4y ago
    My brain just melted reading this. I am sorry but this doesn't make sense and reads like a GPT-3 prompt. Which part of the comment is supposed to be related to the advertisement on app store of apple ?
    • noduerme 4y ago
      As with GPT-3, the production of endless amounts of pseudo-academic-sounding gobbledegook is a feature of Marxist ideology, not a bug.
      • languageserver 4y ago
        The day of the AI has already arrived, as online marxists fail the Turing test
        • thrown_22 4y ago
          That's been the case for quite a while. Especially US Marxists: >The key struggle of workers is that of getting enough minority representation in corporate board rooms. Like the problem with the Irish Potato famine being that Queen Victoria wasn't queer enough.
          • nopenopenopeno 4y ago
            Identity politics are antithetical to Marxism. Marxists focus on class.
            • rsj_hn 4y ago
              Identity politics are antithetical to marxist theory but not necessarily to the marxist movements as they actually existed. Here, things get more complicated because there were marxist movements all over the world, from Africa to Asia to Russia, and each had different motivations and often different goals. In Russia, marxism was always about identity first and foremost, primarily the identity of various outcast/conquered groups: poles, jews, germans, lithuanians, etc. that were in the conquered regions in the Western part of the Empire - primarily the regions that used to be held by Poland. The abstruse economic theories served as a type of schelling point for a coalition of minorites against the Russian Orthodox majority, and after the revolution there was a systematic effort to suppress Russian identity and replace it with a new "Soviet" identity -- e.g. if you look at the list of Soviet general secretaries, only one of them was Russian (although there is some debate as several of the secretaties had mysterious, and in some cases, clearly invented pasts). There were explicit anti-Russian policies put in place, for example there were communist parties in all the provinces except the Russian province, which had no communist party, and thus no road for advancement except to join the overall Soviet Communist Party, but that preferenced non-Russians for membership. Similarly when the Soviets drew the borders of various provinces, they explicitly made the minority provinces much larger, dragging in traditional Russian lands, even as they created local minority communist parties that barred Russians from participation, effectively meaning that 1/3 of Russians were living in an explicitly non-Russian province, even though often times they were the majority population in that province. A good book that covers this topic in depth is Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire" - https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-Nationalism-1923-1939-ebook/dp/B01N291P0U https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-Nationalism... At the same time, Marxism in other areas had a decidedly nationalist tone - for example in Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam or other nations fighting colonialism. Here, too, it was identity and nationalism that was the motivating factor and not the economic theories. Really class-based movements are generally limited to the "West" -- e.g. Western Europe and North America. I'm not saying that class isn't important elsewhere, but when you look at what animates radical movements throughout the world, it's almost always race/religion/language that plays the dominant role, and this is as true for marxist movements as for other types of movements.
• maupin 4y ago
  When I saw ads in the Windows Start menu, I switched to Ubuntu. Haven't looked back and life is good. Except that the command line command apt-get sometimes displays an ad for Ubuntu Pro...
  • thesuitonym 4y ago
    I've never seen such an ad... Maybe it's only an apt-get thing? Try using apt.
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    You may be interested in learning we're currently having a special deal on Frustration Premium, only $5/month. Use code marginalia at checkout.
  • sp1rit 4y ago
    Keep in mind that Cannonical Ubuntu used to display ads/"recommendations " for Amazon products in their launch center thingy.
    • MerelyMortal 4y ago
      Yep, Cannonical backed down on that advertising/revenue stream. Has Google ever backed down on advertising? It remains to be seen if Apple does.
      • ghostpepper 4y ago
        Canonical has ads in the terminal MOTD now
        • deafpolygon 4y ago
          Well, Canoncial products aren't on my shortlist of possible OS alternative anymore. That's ridiculous.
          • 4y ago
• krono 4y ago
  The pushing and pulling was there all along: The play/pause media key automatically starting the Music app, suggestions defaulting to include content from paid services (hey that movie is available on Apple TV!), maps links only working with Apple Maps, searching for selected text opens Safari and disregards your primary browser, permanently enabled share menu options for iCloud and Airdrop. Privacy settings increasingly spread out and opaquely named. No more central unique identifier reset button, but individual ones for each app placed in different submenus. Completely disabling Siri has become some sort of Easter egg hunt. Not that it'll actually stop the data outflow, though. Aggressive surfacing of ecosystem capabilities such as proximity unlock by nearby Apple watch, wake on bluetooth or network, etc. These features were previously configurable through the GUI, but those conveniences have been removed and the features are enabled by default. Local configuration profiles (a free, easy, local, and accessible way to configure your system) are being slowly phased out in favour of third party remote Mobile Device Management services such as Jamf or, of course, the one Apple launched not too long ago. These new advertisements are so prominent and the implementation so obviously bad, that I'm almost suspecting them to be merely a distraction from the much more insidious tricks they've been pulling in the background.
  • bound008 4y ago
    > The play/pause media key automatically starting the Music app $ sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app This was a common complaint I have heard from those coming from Windows/Android and even Linux... It's unix. Also, the play/pause key works with other apps. Other default apps can be set. Many other valid points in this article and thread, but I don't know why people expect the default behavior of the play button to behave any differently when no media is playing. Music.app may have an upsell, but it's still a place to organize your own personal music library. No cloud or SaaS required.
    • krono 4y ago
      Solutions aplenty yes, just not for, say, my mother. Not providing a normal way for users to select a an alternative default (like competitor Spotify), is disproportionally inconvenient relative to the benefits for Apple. Accidental music app launches by my pinky finger brushing the play/pause touchbar control strip button, well.. let's just say it happened more then once. Absolutely maddening.
• mikestew 4y ago
  As I read TFA, I thought to myself, "if it gets bad enough, I'll just load Linux on my Macs." And then it occurred to me how I got started using Apple products. So grab a cuppa for story time. It was a time that I worked for Microsoft, and mmm, mmm, wasn't that uncarbonated company soft drink tasty. But as I dicked with some Plays for Sure(tm) device for the last time, I got fed up and told the spouse, "get in the car, we're going to BellSquare to buy iPods." iPods turned into ditching the Windows Phones for iPhones, then a hackintosh to get a feel for OS X Leopard, then "fine, I'll get a MacBook if I'm going to do iOS development on the side". Fast-forward fifteen years, and it's a house full of HomeKit, Apple Watches (loving that new Ultra), MacBooks, HomePods, etc. It all works well together, so it's easy to justify ditching $DEVICE for an Apple product. And when Apple Premium (one price for all of Apple's services such as TV+, iCloud storage, et. al.) came around, well, of course I said "put that on the Apple Card, please." The point I'm driving at is that a household of Apple products started with one simple purchase of a couple of music players. But keep up the advertising crap to the point that I'm loading a non-Apple OS on Apple hardware, and that unravelling thread might take the rest with it. "It all works so well together" is a blessing and a curse. I'm pretty sure that if, whatever the reason, we ditch the iPhones the rest of it goes with them.
  • lancesells 4y ago
    I was a very happy Windows user and purchased legit licenses for myself and my business. I didn't hate the Mac but I had only used it since OS 9 and I felt Windows was much more stable and customizable. Years go by and I find myself not being able to get a Windows XP license to install because my activation code from the box didn't work. I spend 5+ hours talking to all kinds of support. No one can help me get past this activation code. And that was it. I switched everything to Apple. Anything purchased new for myself or my business was Apple. Windows, Microsoft, Xbox, etc. I won't even consider. The only thing I've used that's Microsoft in the last 20+ years is Github. With their present moves, I know my relationship with Apple products will end with a similar sentiment.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Which is hilariously amusing, because FCKGW probably still activates just fine.
• sebastien_b 4y ago
  > ” I willingly paid a tremendous amount for the hardware, and I choose to pay nearly $500 annually to access Apple services, but seeing ads being further promulgated across the software feels, well, gross.” I stopped paying to see ads when I quit subscription TV. I feel I will soon have to quit paying for ads when getting a new phone.
  • aendruk 4y ago
    Been feeling similarly about Spotify lately. I pay, yet still they’ve been trashing the UI with full screen ads every day.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• shmde 4y ago
  There is an increase of click baity titles on hn. Titles should be like the "Subject" field of Email. Short, crisp, giving a tldr of the body.
  • rchaud 4y ago
    What part of "You Might Also Like" is clickbait?
    • shmde 4y ago
      What does that even mean in the context of the article. The article is about apple introducing ads in their store. Something like "My take on Apple introducing ads on their store" would be way better.
      • deafpolygon 4y ago
        It's the tagline in the Apple App store. When they show advertising it's below the text "You might also like". Or at least they used to.
  • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    I thought the rule was they could not be editorialized. I've never read anything about them needing to read like an email title.
• wintermutestwin 4y ago
  I'm fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem and I have always been puzzled when I hear about Apple perverting their product with the taint of advertisements. I recently realized that my puzzlement is because I don't use Apple News or Stocks and I do all app discovery away from the (cr)Appstore. Unfortunately, I guess that the advertising infection will spread to the point where it is unavoidable. At that point, I will drop Apple and pray that there is a functional alternative.
  • 369548684892826 4y ago
    What's a good alternative to the Appstore for finding apps?
    • wintermutestwin 4y ago
      There are no good alternatives, but I mostly use reddit and general websearches (filtering out the ever prevalent blogspam). I'd probably pay for a ton more apps if the appstore wasn't so terrible.
    • sylens 4y ago
      I usually rely on word of mouth through people I know or follow on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc. I can't recall a time recently where I've sat down, opened up the App Store, browsed for something useful
• noduerme 4y ago
  I do all my work on Macs, and I love the ergonomics of MacOS, but I refuse to use any Apple apps. I hate how Apple broke its own Save/Save As paradigm, and the iOS-ification of things like iTunes/music on the desktop. I use Little Snitch to block all Apple services except in rare instances where I want to download something from the App Store.
• jimt1234 4y ago
  Feels like when the App Store first launched and was quickly dominated by fart apps, except this isn't being driven by devs polluting the App Store, it's being driven by Apple to an already polluted App Store.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rchaud 4y ago
  Depressing to see Apple going toe to toe with Android for the worst app store experience possible. Used to be that people chose MacOS/iOS specifically because it wasn't crawling with ads for dumpster-quality apps.
  • imoverclocked 4y ago
    OTOH, many people have been complaining that the Apple App Store is not more like the Android one(s).
    • thfuran 4y ago
      Specifically in its lack of ads or is it generally some other features they miss?
      • interpol_p 4y ago
        I don't know about Google Play, but Apple's App Store has absolutely horrific search. More often than not, I am googling the app name then finding the App Store link from Google Search results App Store search is abysmal
        • leetnewb 4y ago
          In case you are curious about Google Play's search, you can try it on play.google.com
    • chipotle_coyote 4y ago
      I don't think I've heard that. Do you mean complaints that iOS should be more like Android and not require all software go through the App Store? I've definitely heard that complaint. (And made it, at least on general principle.)
      • imoverclocked 4y ago
        If not all apps have to go through the Apple App Store and multiple App Stores are allowed that are controlled by third parties (ie: not Apple,) what makes you think those stores would be ad-free? Simply put, I think that having multiple app sources naturally leads to ads in the App Store space. Mind you, I hate ads and am in no way arguing in favor of them.
• ianbutler 4y ago
  Between Google Search decreasing in usability and accuracy for pretty much everyone I know in service of more Ads, Netflix Ad tier causing an exodus and now Apple poisoning what was their premium brand to squeeze ad revenue I can't help but think these businesses are starting to cannibalize their core value to their users in service to their shareholders. Companies with Ads are like Rats in that experiment with the button and a wire going to their pleasure center. Tap the button all day but they won't actually do anything useful and everything else wastes away. For a while I've been thinking about the public markets and each time I arrive at the conclusion that the public markets can be really bad for consumers and bad for the businesses themselves. In the end the pursuit of higher stock value for share holders in the short term puts a company at odds with it's customers and it's own initial value proposition. Obviously an IPO is a desirable goal for founders, and maybe (very obviously?) more so their investors because it's a liquidity event and everyone get's paid, but I think for any one running a successful company thinking about what you shackle you and your company to by going public should be a long and hard think, because you're going to wind up making choices at the expense of literally every value and use your business purported to represent. This is also why when choosing to make a startup, as defined by a high growth company designed to quickly arrive at a liquidity event (IPO and publicly traded obviously included) you should really understand if you want exactly that. I've watched at least one founder realize she didn't want that and that she did want to run a business for the customers and the value they were being provided and try to get off the train and it basically wrecked the business. When I read stuff like this I'm always reminded of the line in Aesop Rock's song "None Shall Pass": "Fine, sign of the swine in the swarm when a king is a whore who comply and conform" I guess this was a really long winded way of saying, know the game you're playing before you choose to play it and know who's actually calling the shots.
  • pixl97 4y ago
    I think ad driven markets are a trap in themselves, even outside the public market itself. You have a large portion of end users themselves that will never pay for the product but gladly use the product 'for free'. You have users that would pay for the product, but again, why would they pay for the product if it's "free"? This leaves the only viable products in the market as free products. The only model I know for free service is ad and data collection driven. The business world won't be able to escape this trap themselves, it will be driven by consumer protections and data privacy making targeted advertising via data collection more risky at a legal/compliance level.
• joshstrange 4y ago
  I love my Apple products but I am incredibly worried about Apple's future. I hate ads, I never see them, if something is showing me ads I pay to remove them or stop using that app/service. Currently I'm incessed by Zoom showing me ads after calls even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it. It's incredibly saddening to see Apple start to put ads in more things. It's not the premium experience I'm looking for (and paying for). I love linux for servers but I'm sorry, the desktop is just not my cup of tea. One things on the mac that I enjoy is the quality and style of most 3rd party apps that I use. It's a level of polish that I don't see anywhere else, at least at the same consistency. Call me vain, call me whatever you want but I like looking at pretty UI, I'm staring at my monitors for 8+ hours a day, I'd like to enjoy what I'm doing. An ugly UI isn't unusable but it adds a small subconscious "tax" that is real and does add up (at least for me).
  • Terretta 4y ago
    > It's not the premium experience I'm looking for (and paying for). This is the only way to feel about it: it's un-premium.
  • leokennis 4y ago
    I pay Apple $20 a month for Apple One. I refuse to pay and see ads at the same time. If I am going to see only 1 ad in a normal Apple app (Maps, Music, Podcasts etc.) Apple can kiss that money goodbye. For every Apple Service there’s a good alternative. I’ll turn my iPhone into a piece of Apple hardware with minimal affiliation to Apple software within the afternoon. From there on out, I’ll start investigating to replace my Apple hardware with alternatives at their next renewal cycle. For Apple end users, Tim Cook is the worst CEO you could imagine. A human Excel sheet.
    • shikshake 4y ago
      Is Tim Cook really the problem? Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of directors first, and Tim Cook can only stay CEO as long as he's acting in their interests. Maybe it's too easy to blame the system, but I don't see how Tim Cook should take the majority blame.
• santoshalper 4y ago
  I feel genuine empathy and a little vicarious sadness (not sarcastic or ironic) for all the Apple diehards who loyally went through thick and thin with Apple, including them nearly going out of business, only to discover that Apple is not Different or Exceptional and is, in reality, just another large publicly traded company with the goal of maximizing shareholder returns.
• p0pcult 4y ago
  Advertising is a virus that will filter through its hosts until the host is killed.
  • w1nst0nsm1th 4y ago
    You should have a look at Idiocracy :)
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  Apple is a 2+T dollar company. How much is enough? Is is really such a priority to introduce ads to keep growing each and every damned quarter? And what if people stop buying their hardware because of the crap they're doing with their software; will they stop ads to refocus on hardware or will they milk the fuck out of the people who do keep buying their hardware?
  • Karsteski 4y ago
    It's never enough for investors (all of us, really). That's the difference between public and private companies. One must seek profit over all, and the other is run by people can choose not to do so.
• doitLP 4y ago
  The problem is he incentive to squeeze money out of ads because there’s less innovation happening elsewhere. Yes they’re M* chips but I mean big innovation. how do we ever break the cycle of growth at all costs demanded of public companies?
  • fsflover 4y ago
    By supporting Social Purpose Corporations and the like. See: Purism.
  • thesuitonym 4y ago
    Karl Marx had the answer, but you're not gonna like it.
    • Mistletoe 4y ago
      But that seems to work even less well. Can you name any successful implementation of it?
      • greenie_beans 4y ago
        incomplete list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_cooperatives
        • Mistletoe 4y ago
          That’s very different than a country-wide implementation. Maybe it only works when you have a small group of committed people doing it.
          • peaky_blinder 4y ago
            Marx never specified how “country-wide implementation” should look like, Marxism-Leninism was the most common one. Escaping capitalism in today's world is impossible because the moment you decide to work on different economic model and distance yourself from IMF you'll sign your death sentence. Big players will never allow that.
• doctor_eval 4y ago
  Why the hell are they entering this grubby, grubby industry? They leave money on the table all the time - they have banged on for years about their whole philosophy of saying No to a thousand things for everything they say Yes to - why have they said yes to this? Aside from a handful of RPIs, my entire family uses Apple gear. But for the first time in 2 decades, I'm wondering what a platform change might look like. Considering my investment in Apple gear, even getting me to the "only looking" phase is pretty remarkable.
  • p0pcult 4y ago
    "If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product." -Steve Jobs
    • doctor_eval 4y ago
      Yeah - I didn't want to invoke the Ghost of Steve but ... why stop with your storefront? Why not start slapping Candy Crush Saga stickers on the front of iPhones? But unlike other products, this advertising will provide zero value to Apple customers. We already pay full price for our gear. We pay for Apple One. Unlike most other companies where advertising offsets the sticker price of things, advertising at Apple does not benefit us in any way. For me, being free of advertising is a key benefit of participating in the Apple ecosystem, and one that I assign a significant financial value to. I absolutely hate it.
    • onemoresoop 4y ago
      Apple is still better than the competition in many ways but cracks started appearing. This quote from Steve Jobs is spot on at this time when Apple has become so big that they can't focus on creating a good product anymore because the money is too good. I don't wish to see this but I'm wondering if things were to go the bad direction for Apple, how long would the inertia of good apple of Steve Jobs vision would last. Probably something like a decade if not more...
• hrbf 4y ago
  There used to be a time when Apple hard- and software delighted me. It was expensive but the cost could be justified. Today, Apple hardware gets ever more expensive while adding ever less value for me. With the recent push towards growing service revenue, I fear Apple is going to betray parts of their original DNA. I usually never invoke this, but in this context it feels justified: this would have been impossible with Steve Jobs alive. He would have shut this shit down with a vengeance. Despite being a capitalist with every fibre of his being, he knew where not to go, which line not to cross. If done anyway, in error, he reversed course immediately. I don’t see even a faint shadow of this in Tim Cook.
• fredrikholm 4y ago
  This general trend of deteriorating UX in widespread services is extremely exhausting and depressing. The accuracy you could get with Google searches in 2005-2010-ish was amazing. Knowing how to Google was a secret weapon of computer literacy, you could find anything. Now I save links on a small server (I work on many machines) unless something is posted here on HN, as it's one of increasingly few places where I can search and actually find things. Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become an exercise in self flagellation. I don't know if it was Netflix that started the ball on nonsensical, avant garde categories followed by thousands of auto-playing calls to action, but combined with intrusive ads and obfuscation the day-to-day experience on mainstream internet really sucks the joy out of whatever amazing content that lurks in the cracks of what is actually a set of amazingly marvelous technology.
  • epolanski 4y ago
    > Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become an exercise in self flagellation. This so much, I don't know what's wrong with Youtube search, but on desktop it gives me like 10/20 genuine results then a block of suggestions and no other results. I came to the conclusion that some PO and data guy figured out that if instead of me seeing what I want and leaving they can hook me on some Youtube journey they'll make more money.
    • XCSme 4y ago
      > instead of me seeing what I want and leaving they can hook me on some Youtube journey they'll make more money This sounds so stupid, but it makes a lot of sense and explains so many issues. Why make you click on the video X that you were looking for instead of sending you on a 1 hour rabbit-hole, bonus points if at the end you even had forgotten what you were looking for.
    • latency-guy2 4y ago
      I firmly believe (as in assuming, no proof) that it was both a cost saving measure and what you describe as increasing revenue - think about it in terms of statistics, if you give the user the most relevant videos as the top 5 suggestions, you can cut down the cost of a query substantially and so cheaply so that you spend micro-cents per query, whereas before you'd arbitrarily cut off search results related to the user query after ~50 pages or potentially more, costing maybe thousanths-cents per query The new scenario gets you the user conversion to a watched video and subsequently to a relevant ad, all the way to the 95th percentile, and maybe even 99th percentile conversion, at a fraction of the cost, and doubled with the fact that the extremely relevant result got the user to a video, got more monetization as a result. Your cost is then simply the query time to the cheap edge model, and then the search that provides the most relevant videos to search top-n (in this case 5) It's not working for some people - but who cares, you hit 99th percentile of all users and you've cut down the spending of a black hole that YouTube is, in fact you might've even made the experience better for 99% of users. I have nothing to substantiate my claims, but knowing how I'd reason about it, this would be my assumption for the state YouTube search is in I also hate this and it has made me move away from YouTube search, unfortunately YouTube recommended is quite good at giving me relevant videos to myself
• hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
  Unlimited greed. As if they needed this ad money.
• DamnInteresting 4y ago
  If this is the direction Apple takes, I will be leaving their ecosystem. My attention is finite, and advertising is attention theft.
  • confounded 4y ago
    Where will you go?
• dzikimarian 4y ago
  That's why open ecosystem is a must, so you can easily migrate. Constantly repeated argument from Apple users is that Appstore/iMessage/iOS is closed/doesn't allow sideloading/alternative clients in order to protect the users. Now you can see what happens if you put company in the position, where you have to spend thousands of dollars, multiple hours hours and lots of explaining to your friends in order to leave their walled garden.
• tristor 4y ago
  This infuriates the shit out of me, and I'm a heavy Apple user and a Product Manager. The role of PMs is to be tastemakers, among other things, and I have no idea which PM wrote the PRD/6-pager for adding ads everywhere in iOS, but they should be fired immediately. This experience is the epitome of un-premium, and is a huge step towards there being no experience differentiation in the product between Apple and Android. Apple is able to charge significantly more than competitors for its products /because/ the experience has a premium look and feel compared to the ghetto that is Android. Turning iOS into a ghetto too is definitely not a reasonable product vision.
  • spacemadness 4y ago
    That’s painting PMs with a wide brush. I wish this was always the case, but PMs help bring all sorts of terrible things to light in the world.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• _yb2s 4y ago
  I remember a friend saying Apple should have bought YouTube before Google did, and thinking this person just doesn't get Apple. YouTube is/was a chaotic low quality mess, and Apple only does high quality, beautiful products, with a top quality experience. Now it seems like the idea of Apple owning YouTube doesn't seem off-brand at all. This is really disappointing. I am not willing to see ads at all in my daily life, and am willing to pay for the privileged. It seems Apple is now making that impossible.
• dimva 4y ago
  It's funny remembering how people would say stuff like "if you aren't paying for the product, you ARE the product", and someone even tried to make a Twitter clone where the only differentiator was that you'd pay for it to "prevent" ads and tracking. I thought back then that even if it succeeded in gaining enough users to beat Twitter, it would fail because eventually investors' demand for growth would force them to add ads anyway. You see this happening with cable TV, Roku, and now even Apple. The only way to prevent this is to have a company motivated by something other than growing profits, but that comes with its own problems: stagnation, bloated bureaucracy, and capture by special interests without profit to keep the organization honest and lean. I don't know what the right solution is, only that in very competitive for-profit markets, companies don't dare to worsen the user experience with ads lest they lose customers to a competitor. Given the barriers to entry for developing a new smartphone, including the strong network effect of the app store and OS APIs, this is not that type of market. Most androids already have ads and bloatware, so Apple isn't facing any competitive pressure on this front, sadly.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • fsflover 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512547
• mgaunard 4y ago
  I'd download Spread Sheets.
• epolanski 4y ago
  > What angers me about this trend is that many of the experiences I treasure are being devalued in order to prioritize more revenue How naive to think the richest company in the world sees you as anything but $.
• errantmind 4y ago
  Are there any examples of large public companies that have reversed course on ads and purged them from their products? It seems once they are in place, they infest and eventually permeate to all levels of the product, like cockroaches. I suspect it is just impossible for executives to argue against something tangible (ad-revenue) in favor of something intangible (ad-free experience).
  • danuker 4y ago
    The only times my experience changes for the better is when I take action. Reddit pushing mobile app? Here I am, commenting on this reliable and ad-free website with an incredible signal to noise ratio.
  • teddyh 4y ago
    Not a public company, but São Paulo did this in 2006.
• OisinMoran 4y ago
  Reminds me of this SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2490 I wonder if Apple will offer an opt-out subscription for ads once they get annoying enough.
• rkagerer 4y ago
  Recently I find Amazon Alexa constantly asking "Did you know..." or "By the way..." at the end of most exchanges to introduce or sell me new features, and it drives me completely nuts. Just f- off and do the thing I told you to! Imagine if your hammer had a little LCD running ads for new nails (and other less relevant crap).
• guggalugalug 4y ago
  I just got my first iphone. A 3rd gen(?) SE. I love the device. I'm not a big computers guy, but have used two different mac book pros and most recently a household imac for personal since 2008. On mobile, after BlackBerry, I went samsung / android in large part to intentionally fragment my device / os ecosystem, not put all my eggs in one cart. Samsung devices are very clever. They do not have the same cozy feel as apple, but they are smart. Now my work buddy texts me a twitter link, and it shows on my desktop when i open up safari to check my mail. I don't like that, I don't want that. Maybe I am not ready for ambient computing? I love apple devices, but the os increasingly seems openly confrontational if not hostile. In part I finally switched to apple on mobile because i was tired of android bloat, but it has followed me, just in a different form. A lot of the angst in this thread seems to be borne of the competing incentives of hardware, software, and services. Apple used to be more of a walled garden than they are today. And that, before they were a trillion dollar concern, maybe gave them latitude to execute purely on creative vision.
  • thfuran 4y ago
    >Apple used to be more of a walled garden than they are today. Very briefly, perhaps. But before that, they weren't.
• djitz 4y ago
  The ad auction model is just so ridiculously profitable. You have companies literally trying to out-spend each other for the same service. It’s insane.
• indigodaddy 4y ago
  How does one spend $500/mo on Apple services?
  • projektfu 4y ago
    "I willingly paid a tremendous amount for the hardware, and I choose to pay nearly $500 annually to access Apple services" It says $500/yr or more like $40/month.
    • indigodaddy 4y ago
      Woops, reading appears to be fundamental. Thanks :)
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  I started moving my things out of Apple two years ago. Two years on, I'm still entrenched in a few places. I can tell you, Apple does everything they can to keep you in. Slow download rates, surprisingly frequent failed downloads from iCloud.com, requesting your data from Apple takes at least a week while they put it together, etc. One of last form of lock-in that I'm struggling with is iCloud Photo Library. A service that has been a blessing and a curse. I've been saving my photos there for the better part of a decade. I'm working on getting my photos out (first by requesting my data from Apple, then from iCloud Drive on Windows) and I'm appalled - everything gets dumped into one directory. Inconsistent file naming. Timestamps not always accurate, and "Date Taken" seems to have disappeared from a number of my photos. Albums are not included (unless you count them being a list dumped into a csv). All of that data is kept inside iCloud.. only for them- not for you. So what comes next is a long journey to re-organize all of my photos by year, month. I'm not even sure if my Hidden photos got copied over. This is all 100% a dark pattern to keep users locked into Apple. How many people would get this far? Not many- my wife would have given up at having to request her data from Apple. Then how many would stop when they find out all of your photos get dumped into a single directory (30k photos!) if you try to leave? All of this is to say, I'm done with Apple. I want control of my data, not this circus show.
  • majou 4y ago
    Consider using ifuse from https://libimobiledevice.org/ https://libimobiledevice.org/ to access the SQLite database with all your Photos metadata.
  • firecall 4y ago
    I'm deep into the Apple ecosystem. However my sentiment/thinking isn't far behind yours... I haven't made any serious moves to decouple and go independent and self-hosted. Mostly due to the overheads of dealing with it all, and knowing I have other things to do that actually earn me money, My photos I do sync to multiple sources, and files are an easy one. I could ditch Apple and Google and survive. I'd have to take my medicine and it wouldn't be pleasant at first, but I could do it.
  • Renaud 4y ago
• i_like_apis 4y ago
  Yeah screw that. I typically loathe Apple criticism - it’s usually so confused and biased. But this makes me ask, as a former employee: Why is Apple loosing its way again? Is this what happens when Steve is gone for long enough? Get back to your roots!
  • valleyer 4y ago
    I'll answer, also as a former employee. Craig and Tim figured out that there was a lot of slack in Apple's software quality. That is, they could skimp on quality, favoring a strict schedule and flashy if half-baked features, and adding user-unfriendly stuff like ads, and nothing bad happened to them or to the company. Therefore, they're going to continue to probe in that direction until they meet resistance. Also: Craig and Tim, and probably some other execs, have started to make Apple decisions with an eye toward burnishing their personal brands. This is why we get annual OS releases presented by a freshly-hairstyled Craig putting himself into Web-meme-ready poses. This is why we get Tim waving the flag at a Formula One race and being obsequious toward Donald Trump.
    • i_like_apis 4y ago
      I never minded Craig really. Yes they are all politicians though. At least Craig’s org has the real hardcore engineers. I assume the majority of this stuff falls under Eddie’s org. (Speaking of flashy personalities)
      • valleyer 4y ago
        As someone who worked in Craig's org, I can assure you that there is plenty of non-"hardcore" engineering going on (whatever that means, anyway). Plenty of bullshit. Plenty of incredibly smart, creative people (engineers and managers both), too.
        • i_like_apis 4y ago
          Oh yeah you're right there. It's not all hard engineering, that's for sure. But, that is also the org where a lot of those folks live. and I just mean - very talented people building hard things: WiSE (lot of crap mixed in there too), operating system people, some hardware people. Smart engineers with 5-25+ years of experience and special knowledge.
• MandieD 4y ago
  I’m a business-hours Windows user who drifted into Apple for all my personal devices, aside from a Windows box for amateur radio stuff, and an ever-changing fleet of Linux VMs at Hetzner. It’s about time for a new phone, but the selection of suitable (that is, small) Android devices is dire, and I don’t think I want to get sucked further into Google’s ecosystem, either. So I’ll buy myself what might be one last iPhone 13 mini, and start copying my iCloud photo collection off onto my still-capable 2013 MacBook Pro, and then my NAS, a month at a time. That should give me a couple years to figure out what comes next.
  • fsflover 4y ago
    > That should give me a couple years to figure out what comes next. Next could come GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone.
    • MandieD 4y ago
      As long as any of those will run the "compulsory" apps (banking and parking apps available only on Google Play or Apple's App Store), they'll be on my radar. To keep my options open, I'm starting a slow detachment now.
      • fsflover 4y ago
        These apps can work with Waydroid, unless they have special protection against rooting your phone. In such case, you're out of luck and should ask your government for an action...
• iansinnott 4y ago
  Completely agree with the sentiment in the article. I'd generalize even more and say that Apple software has been going downhill for several years now, and adding in more ads is just a continuation of that trend. On the other hand, they still create phenomenal hardware. The compromise of using Apple hardware and non-Apple software (often paid) has worked well enough for me so far. Some examples: - Podcasts < Overcast - iCloud Drive < Nextcloud (as Hetzner-hosted service) - Notes < Obsidian - Safari < Orion, Arc - Apple Mail < Superhuman (or Spark, or Gmail) - Apple Maps < Google Maps - Pages, Keynote, etc < Google Suite - Terminal < iTerm Likely more I'm forgetting. edit: formatting
  • vinay427 4y ago
    As a counter-example, I recently moved to the Apple ecosystem (after 10+ years, my entire adolescence and adult life, on various Linux distros and Android) primarily for the software and the hardware was, if anything, a drawback in some cases. The suite of first-party native apps that are generally friendly, usable, and well-integrated with iOS/macOS, other apps, and other devices is far better than what I was dealing with on Android and Linux. Those OSs still lack (to my taste) a cohesive native cross-platform experience for email, calendars, shortcuts/scripting, notes, cloud backups, etc. The main Apple apps I tend to avoid are Podcasts and Music due to their user experience and Maps due to its lack of POI data.
    • iansinnott 4y ago
      Agreed regarding other OSes, having tried Android on mobile and PopOS on desktop. The apple OS experience is still the most cohesive, which is why the Apple "base layer" with 3rd-party apps on top is currently the best set of tradeoffs, IMO. My biggest gripe with Apple-made apps is that they seem to think their apps are all of uniformly high quality. Notes, Calendar, Mail are all fine but as you noted Music and Podcasts are not. Same with News, Stocks, Weather. Maps used to be particularly egregious and still was last I checked. > hardware was, if anything, a drawback in some cases Surprised to hear that, although before M1 their internals did seem to be standard components with a higher price tag.
• interpol_p 4y ago
  Do execs not consider long term brand damage? It is hard believe that very smart people, who likely use these products themselves, can be blind to the damage they are doing long term, eroding the trust they have earned. Surely this leads to lower profits in the future (say, in a decade), and should be considered a bad business decision now
  • niek_pas 4y ago
    > (say, in a decade) Tim Cook will likely be gone by then, so what does he care? https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/05/tim-cook-probably-leaving-apple-in-next-ten-years https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/05/tim-cook-probably...
• thefz 4y ago
  Anyone thinking Apple was heralding privacy was wrong, they were just preparing the ground to be the only one to profit on your data.
• ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Sad to see the pirates fall. I guess Apple was the last of the good old companies to finally give in and start it's path to destruction. Time to go back to the drawing board and make the companies for the next few decades. Time for the pirate flags to fly high. Hopefully young kids are not just leet coding and actually building brilliant stuff.