5 ms·

The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division

by jfb 1mo ago

The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general. I'm a long time Apple user, and the idea that ads have any place in my computers is appalling, but now they're in Maps, and they're in the OS as non-dismissible upsells, and I mean, Windows is right over there, all of this is unnecessary strategy taxation on what Apple does well (hardware and software).

throwawayffffas 1mo ago
That was always the strategy, the whole apple ecosystem was always obtuse and closed off from compatibility with the rest of the computing world just to maximize rents. If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.
- m0llusk 1mo ago
  That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.
  - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
    I am not even talking about the apple store, i am talking about printers, cables and file systems in the 90s. Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
    - naravara 1mo ago
      I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in zagging just because everyone else zags if zigging is better. There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds. The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.
      - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
        I think you have this backwards. For the majority of apples history their products were incredibly niche mostly used by designers because certain admittedly superior software for these professionals only shipped with MacOS. The ipod and iphone were the first true mass market products. And even to this day PCs and Android(outside the US) dominate the market share by user count. PC and android are not for tinkerers and nerd, they are the default, apple positions itself as the premium.
        pjmlp 1mo ago
        They have become the default, before PC clones, everyone had their own hardware standards.
    - philistine 1mo ago
      Apple chose SCSI as its connector of choice in the 90s. It was a standard, it was faster and better than Serial, and PC manufacturers never bothered to offer it. Apple chose an internal connector that worked with their CPUs. They couldn't even offer the connection styles on PCs; they worked differently. Apple built its own mouse and keyboard cabling because they wanted to allow their users to connect their mouse to their keyboard, and to start the computer from the keyboard. No common cable offered them that. Apple was literally first to the common rigid diskette. That they came up with file systems of their own is a measure of their early investments, and their need to maintain compatibility. They couldn't move to FAT, they had already made their own stack. From my side of the fence, PC makers were laggards trying to save pennies who couldn't be bothered to invest in better technologies. Apple's success in cornering the majority of profits in the computer sector is a measure of their continued failures.
    - ceejayoz 1mo ago
      > Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose. But that's often the right route. Sometimes what the others are doing is not enough to deliver a good result. Micro-USB sucked, so they made Lightning. Flash ran slow, so they helped kill it.
- pjmlp 1mo ago
  The openness of PC clones was a mistake IBM failed to regain control from, everyone was like Apple.
  - Pet_Ant 1mo ago
    This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy. The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate. But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients. Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default. Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
    - xattt 1mo ago
      How should have IBM acted if they wanted to keep their lock-in?
      - pjmlp 1mo ago
        They did try to keep the lock in, with the release of PS/2 and MCA architecture, which many think it relates only to keyboard and mice ports. However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2
    - ahartmetz 1mo ago
      Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.
    - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
      > Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default. They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess. Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS. Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like. Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.
- fassssst 1mo ago
  > If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Basically what Apple News is, they don’t have a web or Android client.
  - drfloyd51 1mo ago
    News is hardly the Internet. And everything in News is on the Internet. There are news+ articles available to Apple subscribers. This is hardly “the internet”. This is analogous to premium memberships on websites. Nor is it required that an app developer make an app for every platform. Microsoft doesn’t make office for Linux.
  - lucky_cloud 1mo ago
    Is there anything on Apple News that doesn't also exist as a web page?
- jfb 1mo ago
  I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.
- alsetmusic 1mo ago
  > That was always the strategy Wrong. Steve would have charged you for everything he thought they deserved, but he'd never allow ads in Apple Maps. ["We like our own stickers better."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI)
  - ethbr1 1mo ago
    Apple of Jobs' era also realized their price premium came from a combination of 'their devices worked for most users' and 'cool' -- Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Handing the CEO reigns over to a supply chain or financial person is almost always a bad move. They're the critical engine to every physical business, but don't confuse an engine with a steering wheel. (And yes, I know Apple may be a more valuable company today from Cook's tenure, but I don't think anyone would say it's as cool of one)
    - y1n0 1mo ago
      > Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Cook joined apple in 1998. They were not a behemoth. His first year, their net income was 300 million for the entire year.
      - ethbr1 1mo ago
        He was chosen as CEO in 2011. There's a bit of power difference between SVP for worldwide operations (read: component supply and international manufacturing) and CEO.
- KellyCriterion 1mo ago
  Mmmh ... whats the difference to what MS is doing then? :-D
- mns 1mo ago
  That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.
- elorant 1mo ago
  If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.
  - presto8 29d ago
    Companies with ecosystems would like their users locked into their ecosystems. There are many large companies that still do business with customers even if their customers do business with their competitors.
- coldtea 1mo ago
  As a commercial OS, OS X/macOS was quite compatible: FOSS Darwin core, FreeBSD userland, POSIX compiant certified UNIX, built-in Python and Java support. Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift. Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt). There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.
- reaperducer 1mo ago
  If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink
returnInfinity 1mo ago
Steve jobs was even more cut throat, he would have doubled the prices.
- expedition32 1mo ago
  Steve Jobs was a business man and CEO of a company. Judge the man on what he was. And he was those things brilliantly.
  - ceejayoz 1mo ago
    Jobs was also a human and a father, and apparently quite shitty at both. Is that not part of who he was?
    - hirvi74 1mo ago
      If anything, those aspects were probably highly correlated to his success. Our economy runs on a system that does not prioritize nor reward empathy.
walrus01 1mo ago
What Apple is doing is really just a symptom of a malaise with the economy in general, that in the last 25 years the business model of everything that possibly can be pushed that way has changed to: Rent Seeking. In the economics textbook sense of the word. You will own nothing and rent forever. You will not have control over your own data or devices. Having that control is a threat to someone's revenue model for getting you to pay for monthly subscriptions to things and services. Microsoft's new user out of box experience for Windows 11 is also a fine example of this. Imagine where we would be at right now if the Windows Phone had been a wild success and the Microsoft App Store on the Windows Phone was also a wild success. You think the fees and commissions charged and terms/conditions for app publishers would be much different?
- maw 1mo ago
  That is not the economics textbook sense of the phrase. The first sentence from the wikipedia article seems good to me: "R-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth."
  - walrus01 1mo ago
    Running an app store that takes some huge % off the top just for distributing a piece of software would meet this definition: "Rent-seeking middlemen: These actors insert themselves into a transaction by force, law, or monopoly control. They do not make the trade easier or better. They just demand a toll or fee because they control access." Monopoly app store enforced on devices by firmware/operating system lockout inserting yourself as the only middleman to distribute things meets the definition. google "economics rent seeking app store"
    - mc32 1mo ago
      I think the iconic rent seeking is the distributors of goods and services in Japan. They don’t add value but you cannot buy directly from the mfg. Same could be said of resellers in the US when they have exclusive distribution rights to another company’s products and services.
jjice 1mo ago
Which ads are in the OS? Are these the Apple TV and similar, or are there even more?
- KellyCriterion 1mo ago
  Honestly, I even consider the constant reminder to setup Apple Pay as some kind of ad
- ceejayoz 1mo ago
  Per the article: > For example, just recently, Apple deployed its formidable multi-billion-user global cloud infrastructure in service of… promoting the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie. People were, understandably, a bit disconcerted to see their wallet payment app sending them promotional messages about a film, and Apple undoubtedly screwed up in polluting a functional messaging channel about transactions with a commercial message, but hey — this is a clear sign Apple knows it’s got the power to drop a note directly into millions of people’s pockets.
- benhurmarcel 1mo ago
  There are ads in the Apps Store, and in Maps. Also ads for iCloud subscriptions in the settings if you don't use it.
  - dlubarov 1mo ago
    There are also ads in News and Stocks.
isodev 1mo ago
> he sold out his customers I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual. Even the visit to the WH dinner - it is the company, Apple, via various structures committed to doing those things with various VPs and staff onboard brainstorming and supporting along the way. So "John" may bring some nuances but let's not be under the illusion that a huge corporation like Apple would suddenly bounce off to a different track.
- disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
  > I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual. No, the responsibility lies with the culture of growth at all costs. Margins and revenues must continue to increase, whatever else happens. If you want to blame someone, blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options. That's what incentivises this kind of behaviour. As an aside, it's amusing to me that Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products.
  - isodev 1mo ago
    > blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options Yes, I do agree that extreme forms of capitalism are responsible for ruining practically every aspect of modern tech. > Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products Indeed. It wasn't obvious at the time, but with hindsight we can see that the push for privacy was only in areas where Apple wanted to counter Meta/competitors or gain advantage in specific verticals. It was never "user focused".
- jfb 1mo ago
  Absolutely true. Cook is an officer of the company, and has a responsibility to the company itself; and the current incentive structure that Apple operates in dictates a drive towards rents. Change needs to be exogenous, but there is a certain amount of pushback that even a fiduciary can use, and the evidence here is, to me, damning.
tyrabound 1mo ago
If the linux community could focus and organize its efforts it could actually offer an alternative that would reapply pressure that the tech industry has been working hard to lift from itself through creeping encirclement and enclosure, i.e., the Enclosure Acts. People sometimes lament things like how the Europeans stole the land of the indigenous tribes in what would become America or throughout he colonialism in Europe, but what is often overlooked is that this process of taking public lands and giving them to private people was done to the indigenous Europeans long before America was even discovered and colonialism was even engaged in, starting in the 12th century in the UK for example. What the tech companies have been doing to the internet since about the early aughts has been no different, they've been using the same kind of enclosure strategy to limit and parcel out and divide up the internet among the ruling psychopaths.
- dolmen 1mo ago
  > If the Linux community could [...] This starts with a wrong assumption. Like if there was a "Linux community" company driven by a CEO.
AlexandrB 1mo ago
> by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general I wouldn't care about the rents if they weren't in the form of ads being shoved in everywhere. The "2 ads in the first 3 results" of the App Store is a horror show.
- jfb 1mo ago
  The App Store vig with no exit is, if anything, even more distorting.
JKCalhoun 1mo ago
"Services" was probably the only place where Apple could grow. So Eddy Cue stepped up and delivered. I think it sucks too.

by jfb 1mo ago

throwawayffffas 1mo ago

That was always the strategy, the whole apple ecosystem was always obtuse and closed off from compatibility with the rest of the computing world just to maximize rents. If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.

m0llusk 1mo ago
That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.
- throwawayffffas 1mo ago
  I am not even talking about the apple store, i am talking about printers, cables and file systems in the 90s. Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
  - naravara 1mo ago
    I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in zagging just because everyone else zags if zigging is better. There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds. The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.
    - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
      I think you have this backwards. For the majority of apples history their products were incredibly niche mostly used by designers because certain admittedly superior software for these professionals only shipped with MacOS. The ipod and iphone were the first true mass market products. And even to this day PCs and Android(outside the US) dominate the market share by user count. PC and android are not for tinkerers and nerd, they are the default, apple positions itself as the premium.
      - pjmlp 1mo ago
        They have become the default, before PC clones, everyone had their own hardware standards.
  - philistine 1mo ago
    Apple chose SCSI as its connector of choice in the 90s. It was a standard, it was faster and better than Serial, and PC manufacturers never bothered to offer it. Apple chose an internal connector that worked with their CPUs. They couldn't even offer the connection styles on PCs; they worked differently. Apple built its own mouse and keyboard cabling because they wanted to allow their users to connect their mouse to their keyboard, and to start the computer from the keyboard. No common cable offered them that. Apple was literally first to the common rigid diskette. That they came up with file systems of their own is a measure of their early investments, and their need to maintain compatibility. They couldn't move to FAT, they had already made their own stack. From my side of the fence, PC makers were laggards trying to save pennies who couldn't be bothered to invest in better technologies. Apple's success in cornering the majority of profits in the computer sector is a measure of their continued failures.
  - ceejayoz 1mo ago
    > Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose. But that's often the right route. Sometimes what the others are doing is not enough to deliver a good result. Micro-USB sucked, so they made Lightning. Flash ran slow, so they helped kill it.
pjmlp 1mo ago
The openness of PC clones was a mistake IBM failed to regain control from, everyone was like Apple.
- Pet_Ant 1mo ago
  This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy. The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate. But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients. Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default. Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
  - xattt 1mo ago
    How should have IBM acted if they wanted to keep their lock-in?
    - pjmlp 1mo ago
      They did try to keep the lock in, with the release of PS/2 and MCA architecture, which many think it relates only to keyboard and mice ports. However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2
  - ahartmetz 1mo ago
    Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.
  - throwawayffffas 1mo ago
    > Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default. They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess. Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS. Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like. Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.
fassssst 1mo ago
> If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Basically what Apple News is, they don’t have a web or Android client.
- drfloyd51 1mo ago
  News is hardly the Internet. And everything in News is on the Internet. There are news+ articles available to Apple subscribers. This is hardly “the internet”. This is analogous to premium memberships on websites. Nor is it required that an app developer make an app for every platform. Microsoft doesn’t make office for Linux.
- lucky_cloud 1mo ago
  Is there anything on Apple News that doesn't also exist as a web page?
jfb 1mo ago
I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.
alsetmusic 1mo ago
> That was always the strategy Wrong. Steve would have charged you for everything he thought they deserved, but he'd never allow ads in Apple Maps. ["We like our own stickers better."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI)
- ethbr1 1mo ago
  Apple of Jobs' era also realized their price premium came from a combination of 'their devices worked for most users' and 'cool' -- Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Handing the CEO reigns over to a supply chain or financial person is almost always a bad move. They're the critical engine to every physical business, but don't confuse an engine with a steering wheel. (And yes, I know Apple may be a more valuable company today from Cook's tenure, but I don't think anyone would say it's as cool of one)
  - y1n0 1mo ago
    > Cook inherited an Apple that was already a behemoth, and completely ignored (or never knew) how they became one. Cook joined apple in 1998. They were not a behemoth. His first year, their net income was 300 million for the entire year.
    - ethbr1 1mo ago
      He was chosen as CEO in 2011. There's a bit of power difference between SVP for worldwide operations (read: component supply and international manufacturing) and CEO.
KellyCriterion 1mo ago
Mmmh ... whats the difference to what MS is doing then? :-D
mns 1mo ago
That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.
elorant 1mo ago
If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.
- presto8 29d ago
  Companies with ecosystems would like their users locked into their ecosystems. There are many large companies that still do business with customers even if their customers do business with their competitors.
coldtea 1mo ago
As a commercial OS, OS X/macOS was quite compatible: FOSS Darwin core, FreeBSD userland, POSIX compiant certified UNIX, built-in Python and Java support. Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift. Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt). There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.
reaperducer 1mo ago
If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleLink

returnInfinity 1mo ago

Steve jobs was even more cut throat, he would have doubled the prices.

expedition32 1mo ago
Steve Jobs was a business man and CEO of a company. Judge the man on what he was. And he was those things brilliantly.
- ceejayoz 1mo ago
  Jobs was also a human and a father, and apparently quite shitty at both. Is that not part of who he was?
  - hirvi74 1mo ago
    If anything, those aspects were probably highly correlated to his success. Our economy runs on a system that does not prioritize nor reward empathy.

walrus01 1mo ago

What Apple is doing is really just a symptom of a malaise with the economy in general, that in the last 25 years the business model of everything that possibly can be pushed that way has changed to: Rent Seeking. In the economics textbook sense of the word. You will own nothing and rent forever. You will not have control over your own data or devices. Having that control is a threat to someone's revenue model for getting you to pay for monthly subscriptions to things and services. Microsoft's new user out of box experience for Windows 11 is also a fine example of this. Imagine where we would be at right now if the Windows Phone had been a wild success and the Microsoft App Store on the Windows Phone was also a wild success. You think the fees and commissions charged and terms/conditions for app publishers would be much different?

maw 1mo ago
That is not the economics textbook sense of the phrase. The first sentence from the wikipedia article seems good to me: "R-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth."
- walrus01 1mo ago
  Running an app store that takes some huge % off the top just for distributing a piece of software would meet this definition: "Rent-seeking middlemen: These actors insert themselves into a transaction by force, law, or monopoly control. They do not make the trade easier or better. They just demand a toll or fee because they control access." Monopoly app store enforced on devices by firmware/operating system lockout inserting yourself as the only middleman to distribute things meets the definition. google "economics rent seeking app store"
  - mc32 1mo ago
    I think the iconic rent seeking is the distributors of goods and services in Japan. They don’t add value but you cannot buy directly from the mfg. Same could be said of resellers in the US when they have exclusive distribution rights to another company’s products and services.

jjice 1mo ago

Which ads are in the OS? Are these the Apple TV and similar, or are there even more?

KellyCriterion 1mo ago
Honestly, I even consider the constant reminder to setup Apple Pay as some kind of ad
ceejayoz 1mo ago
Per the article: > For example, just recently, Apple deployed its formidable multi-billion-user global cloud infrastructure in service of… promoting the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie. People were, understandably, a bit disconcerted to see their wallet payment app sending them promotional messages about a film, and Apple undoubtedly screwed up in polluting a functional messaging channel about transactions with a commercial message, but hey — this is a clear sign Apple knows it’s got the power to drop a note directly into millions of people’s pockets.
benhurmarcel 1mo ago
There are ads in the Apps Store, and in Maps. Also ads for iCloud subscriptions in the settings if you don't use it.
- dlubarov 1mo ago
  There are also ads in News and Stocks.

isodev 1mo ago

> he sold out his customers I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual. Even the visit to the WH dinner - it is the company, Apple, via various structures committed to doing those things with various VPs and staff onboard brainstorming and supporting along the way. So "John" may bring some nuances but let's not be under the illusion that a huge corporation like Apple would suddenly bounce off to a different track.

disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
> I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual. No, the responsibility lies with the culture of growth at all costs. Margins and revenues must continue to increase, whatever else happens. If you want to blame someone, blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options. That's what incentivises this kind of behaviour. As an aside, it's amusing to me that Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products.
- isodev 1mo ago
  > blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options Yes, I do agree that extreme forms of capitalism are responsible for ruining practically every aspect of modern tech. > Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products Indeed. It wasn't obvious at the time, but with hindsight we can see that the push for privacy was only in areas where Apple wanted to counter Meta/competitors or gain advantage in specific verticals. It was never "user focused".
jfb 1mo ago
Absolutely true. Cook is an officer of the company, and has a responsibility to the company itself; and the current incentive structure that Apple operates in dictates a drive towards rents. Change needs to be exogenous, but there is a certain amount of pushback that even a fiduciary can use, and the evidence here is, to me, damning.

tyrabound 1mo ago

If the linux community could focus and organize its efforts it could actually offer an alternative that would reapply pressure that the tech industry has been working hard to lift from itself through creeping encirclement and enclosure, i.e., the Enclosure Acts. People sometimes lament things like how the Europeans stole the land of the indigenous tribes in what would become America or throughout he colonialism in Europe, but what is often overlooked is that this process of taking public lands and giving them to private people was done to the indigenous Europeans long before America was even discovered and colonialism was even engaged in, starting in the 12th century in the UK for example. What the tech companies have been doing to the internet since about the early aughts has been no different, they've been using the same kind of enclosure strategy to limit and parcel out and divide up the internet among the ruling psychopaths.

dolmen 1mo ago
> If the Linux community could [...] This starts with a wrong assumption. Like if there was a "Linux community" company driven by a CEO.

AlexandrB 1mo ago

> by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general I wouldn't care about the rents if they weren't in the form of ads being shoved in everywhere. The "2 ads in the first 3 results" of the App Store is a horror show.

jfb 1mo ago
The App Store vig with no exit is, if anything, even more distorting.

JKCalhoun 1mo ago

"Services" was probably the only place where Apple could grow. So Eddy Cue stepped up and delivered. I think it sucks too.