> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience.
YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!
It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?
ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.
This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original email for the purchase and click the link in there.
> This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already bought in your own library it will promote different versions of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and really manipulative and really sucks!
I've canceled Amazon Prime precisely due to this issue. All I wanted was to browse the videos that are included in the subscription, but instead I'm bombarded with videos that I need to pay extra for. Which made me recognzize that the subscription is useless, so I'll watch videos at other streaming platforms.
This analogy to Amazon is why I submit the idea that customers don’t care and expect advertising.
Look up the brand perception of Amazon. It’s one of the highest in the business including high trust scores. High trust scores, for a company that sells counterfeit products! Perception is not reality.
Your average consumer (I.e., complete dumbass) barely recognizes advertisements and often reports enjoying them when they do recognize them. I can’t count how many people tell me that they see products advertised to them in Instagram that are exactly what they wanted/like.
When Steve Jobs ran Apple it was a niche premium computer company who had customers with above average incomes and education levels. It was different time. He died more than 10 years ago.
That’s not exactly what Apple is today. iPhones are used by over half of all Americans. You can’t really buy a decent computer that’s cheaper or a better value proposition than the previous generation MacBook Air $550 Walmart special.
As a side note, I would note that Apple Maps already has “ads,” because it has a Yelp integration. I think this whole thing is a part of removing that and bringing the same functionality in-house.
I think you’d be insane not to monetize Maps with Apple being the size that it is. It costs a huge amount of money to operate as a free service, and your median customer expects ads to be there.
If you want that niche, discerning customer experience, buy a Framework or System76: Linux has the same marketshare now that Apple had when Jobs returned to Apple.
How are you browsing your Amazon content? I see search bars on the 'All Content' [1] page, and also on each individual page, like my movies and shows [2].
Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're looking?
You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.
Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)
Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.
I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now.
Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.
For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).
iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted links but they're not as prominent.
The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite literally half the screen.
I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
> Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always* places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
> I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost less time to find out than writing this comment ;)
The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
One huge downside of iBooks is that it would happily deauthorize access to the (DRM free) epub files you’ve added to the app manually after a couple of days without internet connection. I made a mistake of going on a long distance hiking trip and thinking can read some books in the tent before falling asleep. Nope, eBooks refused me until I returned to the mobile coverage area and resynced my library with their cloud service. I switched to an offline-first 3rd party app immediately after.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue (due to inflation). Until we measure, define, and value experience in nominal terms through data, most leaders won't care because it will remain an estimate against hard data.
Yes, profoundly true and sadly profoundly not understood by most. Levers can be pulled for near term quantitative gains at the expense of long term qualitative experience. ERP systems and the like largely measure the quantitative, all things pegged to the almighty dollar. Most orgs have no such system or competency (with the exception of siloed martech systems) for measuring the qualitative. And the customer journey isn’t set up in such a way to reliably and consistently throw off the needed data in the first place. I’ve been preaching that orgs looking for true longevity need to make measuring experiences and sentiment a core competency, so the qualitative impact of levers being pulled can be measured and reported on in realtime, allowing short sighted decisions to be backtracked, and ideally, long term, putting functional guard rails in place that prevent those decisions from being made in the first place.
> I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
I disagree. They know exactly what they're doing. Executives get paid and promoted based on quarterly profitability, not long-term vision or a sustainable business model. By the time the damage from what they've done is apparent and felt, the execs responsible will have long since retired to a beach somewhere in the tropics, or taken a higher paying role at another company where they'll start the process anew.
> Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue (due to inflation).
Yes that is capitalism however if inflation cuts value of money in half and in the same time your revenue doubles, did you actually double your revenue? Do you even need to change your service or product to justify raising prices when the currency is being devalued? For both these questions there is a strong case that the answer is no.
The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at Windows.
This is why you should always pirate digital media, even if you bought it.
A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.
I always pirate the media i buy and/or the physical books i buy.
Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can take… good notes on the pages).
This is especially egregious in the Books app on all platforms. I dream of a version that presents you with your library on launch instead of the store — good user experience would expect you to be opening the app to read books 99% of the time, not to purchase new ones.
Thankfully, on macOS, you can disable the store in the Music app entirely. This will probably be removed at some point. When disabled, the only remnant is a small username in the bottom-left corner of the screen. I would love to see this gone as well, but local libraries are increasingly of no concern to Apple or the general public so I doubt they will fix this.
> uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience
As Jobs understood (per TFA), pushing ads degrades the user experience - the prime differentiating factor for Apple products in the first place, and what attracted many people to the platform.
It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as Apple's services businesses increase their share of revenue and exert expanding influence over product design within the company.
Banning Apple from leveraging its platform for advertising Apple services might help, but the fact that we have arrived at the point where we have to rely on antitrust enforcement to make Apple products less intrusive and user-hostile shows that the company has lost its way.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
Unfortunately, requirements that Apple provide a choice to install Spotify rather than Apple Music, or Kindle rather than Apple Books, on a new iPhone doesn't fix the problem.
It's a general trend with hired managers who optimize for their bonuses. Also many founder led companies when they got sold to the shareholders are also optmizing for that. Some founder led companies are optimizing for something else, not profits only, but that's rare and that's what Jobs had the leeway to do when he got back to the almost bankrupt company.
Current minions will try to squeeze more profit from any screen the incentives are such that they'd do that.
Enshitification is possible where there is some kind of lock-in and the pain of leaving is greater than the level of annoyance of the product. Apple has one of the strongest lock-in ecosystems and it's rational for them to do so.
I'm not sure there is a better way, because max freedom = open source, but that equals mostly subpar experience for the average user. Let's hope for more platforms and data transfer from one to the other.
>> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26 they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music from iTunes Store.
I haven't seen ads on the App Store for a long time. To update my apps I just long press the App Store icon and tap Updates. It leads you directly to the updates without going to the homepage.
I just opened up App Store and the first screen is a full screen ad for Roblox. Then you scroll down and it’s 4 “now trending” ads, then below that another full screen as. The entire “Today” tab is a scroll full of ads.
I disagree.
You can disable all the apps—in fact never use _any_ app if you can avoid it altogether.
Apps are inherently bad, and the web version is always better.
It didn’t have to be like this, but here we are.
I often go weeks without opening any app but the browser on my phone.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Apple's beancounters have figured out that they just have to be more polished than Microsoft and Google's environments, and despite the legitimate complaints you've made, they still are.
Precisely. This is their "Have the cake and eat it too" strategy, where so long as they aren't as egregious as their competitors, they know it's a Net gain as most of their customers will still feel the grass is still greener in their wall garden than elsewhere. Even if the grass isn't near as green or well kept so to speak as it used to be.
Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine. However, you have to question if that’s what most people who use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don’t necessarily have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad supported free music streaming services if they never pay for music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.
Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.
Android allows changing, and disabling, the default though. Last I checked, trying to open an MP3 will demand the Music app on an iPhone, and clicking an Apple Music link will do the same instead of allowing one to open a webpage
When I put it away, I always leave it there (or in an open book) and it always stays there (or in an open book).
At least on Mac, I have noticed the Apple TV app seems to stay on one of the Library tabs indefinitely if I leave it there, but maybe it has just escaped their notice.
On the other hand, there’s no separate tab for “Continue Watching.” (A partial work-around is using the widget.)
Hey now. If they allowed you to simply enjoy the stuff you have without butting in to remind you of everything you don’t have, you might actually feel a moment of lightness and happiness. If they want you spending money they need to cultivate feelings of covetousness, inadequacy, or fear. Contentment doesn’t sell.
Apple’s services pull in more revenue than Macs and iPads combined.
The expectation that they won’t advertise them is, unfortunately, not a reasonable one.
You can turn off Apple Music the service entirely from the music app. If you stick to the library tab in books you’ll never see an ad. It’s really not anywhere close to the worst offender in the industry.
I haven’t used Apple devices back when they were good so I have always avoided all the built-in Apple bloat/adware.
Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software.
It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.
As a Linux user, I feel like a different breed here: I'm pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from now will be pretty much the same, and I'm happy about that.
> I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me.
The books app itself is infuriating. It's more like a store with a list of purchases attached. Every single time I want to pull up my audiobooks, for instance, I hit the "audiobooks" button.... just to find the store instead. Every time I want to search through my library, I use the "search" box... just to find the store instead. Maddening.
The apple music app I actual really like, probably because it's not actually easy to purchase anything through it. The only major ask is that they stop limiting the number of recently added so I can actually find music I added
I was gifted an iPad for Christmas a few years back and quickly found out there's nothing you can do on it without either looking at ads or paying a subscription. I returned it before the factory battery charge ran out.
> I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app
That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.
I hated using the Books app without the book store disabled. The setting is buried in Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Allowed Apps & Features -> Book Store
Like fitness where they want you to activate Fitness+. This means the one they are shipping is trash? Plus, thank you, I know where the App store is in case I need it
This behaviour deeply bothers me, and my family doesn't get it. I've tried to explain it, but I think they're so accustomed to it that it doesn't really matter to them or occur to them as nefarious or malicious.
The way I see it, this type of behaviour by Apple (or any other company doing this) is an invasion of mental real estate. When you force things in front of my eyes that I didn't ask to see, or in my ears, or whatever, that's occupying my brain cycles and space in ways that are entirely uninvited.
Of course, the EULAs and whatnot all require me to agree to this bullshit, so fine, it's technically invited when I opened the application and said "sure, try to sell me your stuff", but to me this isn't the spirit of the software or operating system at ALL, and has been a signal of worse things to come for some time now. It's essentially enshittification.
My answer has been to stop using it. After 25 years of using Apple's computers and around 12 years on their phones, I'm migrating off. No more iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, etc. I'm still on a mac and that'll be hard to change, but it's slowly happening. I spent the last week on the ocean and in the woods on a toughbook, and that was kind of fun. It was eye opening to take a computer where I'd never take a macbook.
I find this kind of behaviour totally deplorable anyway, and I can't tolerate it. It's insidious and damaging to their brand because ultimately it's harmful to their users. They want number to go up, I get it, but I'm not their fodder.
If Apple puts ads in its Maps, there will be an opening for a gorgeously-skinned OpenStreetMaps app. Possibly even with a $1/year WhatsApp-style subscription.
I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.
Organic Maps is very close to be that gorgeous OSM app. Unfortunately, it still lacks a lot of functionality that’s missing from OSM dataset, and is present in most commercial mapping apps, like the opening hours for businesses, public transport schedules or user reviews.
I don't know what you're complaining about, this is obviously about making user interactions delightful. Of course most people will cherish the bundling opportunities of Apple products, and would be offended if similar books weren't shown in their libraries as easy purchases. It's delightful.
/s
More seriously: Apple, please never rework the compass, I don't need ads for Apple Compass+ when I'm hoping to figure out which was is north.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
> Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store
As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms. Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial.
My frustration with Apple when I tried it out was that you either use iTunes or there's little other choice. Technically some choice, yes, but because most people are passive and use the Apple stuff by default, there's a smaller community of developers who are motivated to try to compete.
When I see people criticize Notepad in Windows (for example) it feels irrelevant because you're not expected to use Notepad for anything but the most trivial use cases. There are so many other, better options, and the platform has a culture of exploring those options.
Microsoft used to have one of the best media players around! Windows used to have built in streaming support from device to device. You could load up music on your personal PC and play it on your home theater through your Xbox360! Windows Media Player was huge, only eclipsed by Winamp at the time.
Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)
They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn sucked all the air out of the room.
They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!
Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)
What do you mean "modern"? I'm using iPhones since 4S and I don't think that Music or iBooks workflow changed, it's largely the same. So probably Steve Jobs was OK with that.
Um, no? Apple Music wasn't even a thing in the iPhone 4S timeframe. You used to buy music in the iTunes Store, and play it in the music player app.
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.
The Music app on iPhones went from simple and usable to an absolute dumpster fire pushing a subscription. Even with a subscription it's incredibly maddening because of the terrible UX and show-stopping bugs (Literally failing at playing music!).
The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26 since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own library.
The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here.
I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.
> "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill
I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.
Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc
If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained.
I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff.
Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products.
I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question.
That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.
So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.
Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.
But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.
Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials), and then steve just told everyone they were holding their phones wrong.
>Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.
If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they will).
Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.
I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact.
His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.
Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.
The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul of the company, if there is such a thing.
Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.
>I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product.
It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.
I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point.
If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.
This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.
Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it.
Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.
Google maps is better, except for the ads. If Apple Maps gets ads, I’ll just switch to Google. So weird that Apple wouldn’t comprehend that privacy (which requires no ads) is their moat.
The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope they abstain. But it’s really not too offensive in my opinion.
That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.
> I think Steve would have changed with the times too
That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.
Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases.
(But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)
Of course we don’t know. But regarding this specific example, bear in mind that Apple is in vastly better shape as a business than it was in 1999. So if that argument didn’t work on him then, it doesn’t seem implausible that it wouldn’t work now.
Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable.
Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.
genuinely the worst opinion I’ve seen on HackerNews
there are such better ways to enable these experiences without introducing the zero-sum, scam-inducing, corporate fuckery game that making it a pay-to-win ad-driven experience gives you
I’m also concerned that boredom makes you want to see ads
That sounds absolutely awful, honestly. I wouldn't want to see any of those things mess with the "natural" order of search results for whatever I've explicitly searched for.
Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot on growing revenue from services.
Which is kind of sad because they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad:
- just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.
- make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.
As for services they could go other way:
- be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or charge end user more with subscription.
- make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
They don't put MacOS on iPad because they want MacOS to slowly die and make App Store the only way to install software. This has nothing to do with cannibalizing Mac.
It is worrying that the machines many of HN rely on are the minority of their revenue so they'd not even flinch financially to mess up that product line. TF for Linux/x86/arm as an alternative ecosystem that is not controlled by one party.
It’s astonishing to me that even so many long-term Apple observers don’t see this, even though they are sorta obvious about it. “Now that the hardware is so close, the systems converge, etc., there is really no reason iPad will not eventually run macOS” – No, macOS will continue to be dumbed and locked down (“security!!11”) until the point where the Macs can be safely switched over from the terribly open legacy OS.
your chart shows total revenue but not per category but even so it shows the last 4 years revenue didn't grow that much as before and its mostly growing because grow in services revenue.
That’s in the US. Also I’m their target, but given their trajectory I’m increasingly inclined to switch to the other side, and I know that others are too.
Timmy is too worried about the goddamn stock price for that. They could easily just transition to a company that isn’t promising stupid growth every quarter and just pays fat dividends on a portion of the profits.
just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.
Am I the only one who does not want this? An iPad is an iPad. It's so simple that my old parents have no trouble figuring out how to use it.
By adding macOS to it, I can't get it for my parents anymore because it's way too complicated for them. That's bad for business for Apple since the iPad is designed to be a bigger iPhone.
But wait.. what if you can choose iPad/macOS mode? Ehh... so what should iPad hardware/software engineers optimize for? They're totally different use cases. The market for people wanting to run a hybrid iPad is likely much smaller than you think. Tech communities on the internet is loud but I'm going to guess that 95% of iPad users do not care/want macOS on it.
make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.
Macbook Pros already provide excellent value. Where else can you find the fastest and most efficient chips, outstanding high solution display, excellent metal build quality, keyboard, speakers, touchpad, and a polished OS in one? They make the margins on RAM/SSD upgrades. I have no problem with that. The base models provide outstanding value.
make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
Ok if you do that, you'd have to increase warranty cost, calculate complex formulas for electricity, bandwidth for profitability since each customer will have different parameters. I fail to see how this is more efficient than just doing things in the cloud. I don't think customers want this stuff. I think mac Minis are cheap enough. I got my M4 Mini for $500. It's a steal.
Explain like I'm five, how does a multi trillion dollar company expect to keep growing revenue forever? Are they planning to keep enshittifying user experience until revenue dives?
No one knows, they are just trying to kick the can as far as they can and escape the inevitable coming back to Eartb of the stock price. P/E is currently 36. Everything plateaus. The human population is plateauing. The SP500 is now 2 standard deviations from the mean and that’s as far as it has ever gone.
you omitted the most important 2 words from my quote: "growing revenue fromservices". If you read other part of my post I shared ideas how they could grow revenue without enshitification.
After that saturate they can keep innovating like xiaomi - they build plenty of useful home products so apple can as well.
I ran a reverse image search on the image of Steve Jobs, and couldn't come up with anything, so it does appear that it might be AI generated, which I don't approve of.
This is something that really grates with me, but it’s made so much worse with the AI-generated image of him. If you want to say that you don’t think Apple should do that, then fine. But stop using Jobs to fight your battles, and especially don’t generate images of him with that attention-seeking YouTube thumbnail face.
> It’s WWDC week. Every time this rolls around, I see people saying the same sort of thing. “Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done this”.
> Firstly, Jobs wasn’t perfect. He got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. His opinion wasn’t the end of the argument when he was alive, and it’s certainly not now that he’s been dead 14 years.
> But more importantly: Stop putting your opinion in a dead man’s mouth to give it more credibility. It’s ghoulish. Let your opinion stand on its own two feet.
Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous person doing something he never did.
Honestly, there should be laws against gen AI models creating fake media with real individuals. We're going to end up with a massive mess on our hands once the video starts looking more realistic
It's impossible to determine with 100% confidence whether or not an image/video was AI generated. If the AI-generated image of Steve Jobs had been copied a bunch on the web, a reverse image search would have turned up lots of sources. Watermarks are imperfect and can be removed. There will always be ambiguity.
So either you're underzealous and if there's ambiguity, you err on the side of treating potentially AI-generated images as real. So now you only catch some deepfakes. This is extra bad because by cracking down on AI-generated content, you condition people to believe any image they see. "If it was AI generated, they would have taken it down by now. It must be real".
The alternative is being overzealous and erring on the side of treating potentially genuine images as AI-generated. Now if a journalist takes a photo of a politician doing something scandalous, the politician can just claim it was AI-generated and have it taken down.
It's a no-win situation. I don't believe that the answer is regulation. It'd be great if we could put the genie back in the bottle, but lots of gen-AI tools are local and open-source, so they will always exist and there's nothing to do be done about it. The best thing is to just treat images and videos with a healthy amount of skepticism.
This author is a man who worked closely with Steve Jobs, and the photo was obviously AI generated, so I think this gives him leeway to do such a thing.
It isn't obvious to you that it's AI? You had to look it up? Please get more familiar with actual photographs, maybe skim a few AI free photo sites or, oh, I don't know, buy a few coffee table photo books and develop some discernment, because that one is about as obvious a fake photo as a stick figure would be. It's truly gross.
The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager, everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, there are major CTAs that are essentially "black on black" and practically not visible below 50% screen brightness and not acceptably visible at max brightness. Just last night I noticed the browser tabs will render full color content behind the text. It's so bad I've been considering cataloging screenshots and writing about it, because some of it's laughably bad.
> The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5 was revealed a year after Jobs stepped down as CEO and his death shortly after. The design was almost surely locked in while he was still CEO.
I spent a few hours trying to debug some fixed position issues with my JS/CSS code recently.Found out that iOS Safari fundamentally broke fixed positioning. How do you break `position: fixed`?
Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.
I have no doubt that the team behind Liquid Glass had the same noble motivations as the team behind Microsoft's Metro Design Language in 2010.
In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!
But there's a matter of taste as well as novelty. And while there were many incredible things about Metro, history bears witness to how much Zune and Windows Phone and Windows 8 have become beloved household names in the decade-and-a-half since.
I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
> I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
Agree. Jobs took big swings like Liquid Glass but, perhaps the most important part that’s missing in present Apple, he was obsessive about ensuring the swings were executed to a high standard. He was hands on in this pursuit.
It’s actually weird to me that a company so large, so well compensated, so profitable, so prolific, etc can’t seem to care enough about the details without a Jobs-esque foot on their neck type leader to be afraid of.
I don't think Metro died because it was bad as a matter of taste. Quite the opposite actually, I wasn't a huge fan of its aesthetics but I was surprised by how many people liked it.
No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself - it was actually very good in that department, arguably still the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the devices ended up being very limited overall because there were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).
I am running the latest iOS 26.1 and it's still very buggy. The most annoying one is that anytime I either restart my phone or update the phone (which restarts it), the wallpaper changes to all black.
That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen icons didn't look so ugly with black background.
Iphone user here. I have to admit that the IOS UI/UX has become really tiring and at times I'm utterly confused by inconsistency, a total contrast from the early days IOS when everything was consistent and intuitive. The silver lining is that I am using my Iphone less and less.
They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search. For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple? (Now the first result for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok is at least the correct first party ad, though this almost seems like extortion on the part of Apple.)
(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)
Yeah especially since it probably wouldn't take long to scrub through some WWDC presentations of his to find him holding up his hands like that (or a gesture of comparable meaning)
Most Apple veterans and current will agree and tell you they do not like the direction the company has gone/is going.
Most are still there as Apple has one of the most stable employment places, ever. I know a lot of old senior Apple folks who all come back to Apple to retire as the benefits are good, pay is ok, and it’s beyond stable.
To this end, including the way Apple operates, it’s low noise and low friction to just coast and let the leadership team duke it out over revenue streams.
Readit News
YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!
It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?
ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.
And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original email for the purchase and click the link in there.
This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already bought in your own library it will promote different versions of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and really manipulative and really sucks!
People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.
Look up the brand perception of Amazon. It’s one of the highest in the business including high trust scores. High trust scores, for a company that sells counterfeit products! Perception is not reality.
Your average consumer (I.e., complete dumbass) barely recognizes advertisements and often reports enjoying them when they do recognize them. I can’t count how many people tell me that they see products advertised to them in Instagram that are exactly what they wanted/like.
When Steve Jobs ran Apple it was a niche premium computer company who had customers with above average incomes and education levels. It was different time. He died more than 10 years ago.
That’s not exactly what Apple is today. iPhones are used by over half of all Americans. You can’t really buy a decent computer that’s cheaper or a better value proposition than the previous generation MacBook Air $550 Walmart special.
As a side note, I would note that Apple Maps already has “ads,” because it has a Yelp integration. I think this whole thing is a part of removing that and bringing the same functionality in-house.
I think you’d be insane not to monetize Maps with Apple being the size that it is. It costs a huge amount of money to operate as a free service, and your median customer expects ads to be there.
If you want that niche, discerning customer experience, buy a Framework or System76: Linux has the same marketshare now that Apple had when Jobs returned to Apple.
Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're looking?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/a... [2] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/v... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/mystuff/library
Dead Comment
Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)
Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.
I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).
iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted links but they're not as prominent.
The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite literally half the screen.
I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always* places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost less time to find out than writing this comment ;)
I just tried Things, Excel, Photoshop Elements, and Grand Theft Auto. Each was the first result.
So I guess YMMV on this.
Like you, I hate it when ads trump organic results.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
Sub music with the thing you like.
Freaking heck, I've gotta dismiss ads on my BANKING APP just to deposit a check.
I disagree. They know exactly what they're doing. Executives get paid and promoted based on quarterly profitability, not long-term vision or a sustainable business model. By the time the damage from what they've done is apparent and felt, the execs responsible will have long since retired to a beach somewhere in the tropics, or taken a higher paying role at another company where they'll start the process anew.
Yes that is capitalism however if inflation cuts value of money in half and in the same time your revenue doubles, did you actually double your revenue? Do you even need to change your service or product to justify raising prices when the currency is being devalued? For both these questions there is a strong case that the answer is no.
A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.
I always pirate the media i buy and/or the physical books i buy.
Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can take… good notes on the pages).
Thankfully, on macOS, you can disable the store in the Music app entirely. This will probably be removed at some point. When disabled, the only remnant is a small username in the bottom-left corner of the screen. I would love to see this gone as well, but local libraries are increasingly of no concern to Apple or the general public so I doubt they will fix this.
As Jobs understood (per TFA), pushing ads degrades the user experience - the prime differentiating factor for Apple products in the first place, and what attracted many people to the platform.
It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as Apple's services businesses increase their share of revenue and exert expanding influence over product design within the company.
Banning Apple from leveraging its platform for advertising Apple services might help, but the fact that we have arrived at the point where we have to rely on antitrust enforcement to make Apple products less intrusive and user-hostile shows that the company has lost its way.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
Unfortunately, requirements that Apple provide a choice to install Spotify rather than Apple Music, or Kindle rather than Apple Books, on a new iPhone doesn't fix the problem.
Enshitification is possible where there is some kind of lock-in and the pain of leaving is greater than the level of annoyance of the product. Apple has one of the strongest lock-in ecosystems and it's rational for them to do so.
I'm not sure there is a better way, because max freedom = open source, but that equals mostly subpar experience for the average user. Let's hope for more platforms and data transfer from one to the other.
Hell, I’d be happy if they stopped defaulting the search to Apple Music instead of local library.
That’s not even to begin talking about how having Apple Music subscription once fucks your iTunes library forever.
I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26 they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music from iTunes Store.
(owned and operated by Apple, and __you__ paid for it.)
It didn’t have to be like this, but here we are.
I often go weeks without opening any app but the browser on my phone.
VLC is your friend.
Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.
When I put it away, I always leave it there (or in an open book) and it always stays there (or in an open book).
At least on Mac, I have noticed the Apple TV app seems to stay on one of the Library tabs indefinitely if I leave it there, but maybe it has just escaped their notice.
On the other hand, there’s no separate tab for “Continue Watching.” (A partial work-around is using the widget.)
The expectation that they won’t advertise them is, unfortunately, not a reasonable one.
You can turn off Apple Music the service entirely from the music app. If you stick to the library tab in books you’ll never see an ad. It’s really not anywhere close to the worst offender in the industry.
Is it a great thing? No.
Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software.
It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.
The books app itself is infuriating. It's more like a store with a list of purchases attached. Every single time I want to pull up my audiobooks, for instance, I hit the "audiobooks" button.... just to find the store instead. Every time I want to search through my library, I use the "search" box... just to find the store instead. Maddening.
The apple music app I actual really like, probably because it's not actually easy to purchase anything through it. The only major ask is that they stop limiting the number of recently added so I can actually find music I added
That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.
The way I see it, this type of behaviour by Apple (or any other company doing this) is an invasion of mental real estate. When you force things in front of my eyes that I didn't ask to see, or in my ears, or whatever, that's occupying my brain cycles and space in ways that are entirely uninvited.
Of course, the EULAs and whatnot all require me to agree to this bullshit, so fine, it's technically invited when I opened the application and said "sure, try to sell me your stuff", but to me this isn't the spirit of the software or operating system at ALL, and has been a signal of worse things to come for some time now. It's essentially enshittification.
My answer has been to stop using it. After 25 years of using Apple's computers and around 12 years on their phones, I'm migrating off. No more iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, etc. I'm still on a mac and that'll be hard to change, but it's slowly happening. I spent the last week on the ocean and in the woods on a toughbook, and that was kind of fun. It was eye opening to take a computer where I'd never take a macbook.
I find this kind of behaviour totally deplorable anyway, and I can't tolerate it. It's insidious and damaging to their brand because ultimately it's harmful to their users. They want number to go up, I get it, but I'm not their fodder.
"Apple used to mean something" is a postmodern catechism to make you feel better when Apple reveals themselves as a federally-backdoored shoggoth.
I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.
nose boops Kagi
/s
More seriously: Apple, please never rework the compass, I don't need ads for Apple Compass+ when I'm hoping to figure out which was is north.
Dead Comment
> Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store
As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms. Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial.
My frustration with Apple when I tried it out was that you either use iTunes or there's little other choice. Technically some choice, yes, but because most people are passive and use the Apple stuff by default, there's a smaller community of developers who are motivated to try to compete.
When I see people criticize Notepad in Windows (for example) it feels irrelevant because you're not expected to use Notepad for anything but the most trivial use cases. There are so many other, better options, and the platform has a culture of exploring those options.
Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)
They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn sucked all the air out of the room.
They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!
Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.
The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26 since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own library.
The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.
I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.
Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc
If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained.
I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff.
Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products.
yeah, but that ship has sailed.
That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.
So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.
But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.
If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they will).
His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.
Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.
The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product.
It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.
If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.
This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.
Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.
That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.
That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.
Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases.
(But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)
Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable.
Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.
- I search for "restaurants" and someone is having a special
- A trampoline park opens near me, I'd like it to catch my eye
- I've been googling chocolates recently, so populate the map with chocolate shops
- Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway
I'm glad there are always ads available to stop my mind from wandering.
there are such better ways to enable these experiences without introducing the zero-sum, scam-inducing, corporate fuckery game that making it a pay-to-win ad-driven experience gives you
I’m also concerned that boredom makes you want to see ads
- just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.
- make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.
As for services they could go other way:
- be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or charge end user more with subscription.
- make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
[0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
Genuine question: is there a comparable Windows machine in a mini desktop form factor at a similar or lower price?
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/apples-fiscal-2025-in-cha...
And even a little bit of analysis will show none of your ideas will grow the bottom line.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/09/teen-iphone-ownership-c...
By adding macOS to it, I can't get it for my parents anymore because it's way too complicated for them. That's bad for business for Apple since the iPad is designed to be a bigger iPhone.
But wait.. what if you can choose iPad/macOS mode? Ehh... so what should iPad hardware/software engineers optimize for? They're totally different use cases. The market for people wanting to run a hybrid iPad is likely much smaller than you think. Tech communities on the internet is loud but I'm going to guess that 95% of iPad users do not care/want macOS on it.
Macbook Pros already provide excellent value. Where else can you find the fastest and most efficient chips, outstanding high solution display, excellent metal build quality, keyboard, speakers, touchpad, and a polished OS in one? They make the margins on RAM/SSD upgrades. I have no problem with that. The base models provide outstanding value. Ok if you do that, you'd have to increase warranty cost, calculate complex formulas for electricity, bandwidth for profitability since each customer will have different parameters. I fail to see how this is more efficient than just doing things in the cloud. I don't think customers want this stuff. I think mac Minis are cheap enough. I got my M4 Mini for $500. It's a steal.Explain like I'm five, how does a multi trillion dollar company expect to keep growing revenue forever? Are they planning to keep enshittifying user experience until revenue dives?
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
After that saturate they can keep innovating like xiaomi - they build plenty of useful home products so apple can as well.
> It’s WWDC week. Every time this rolls around, I see people saying the same sort of thing. “Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done this”.
> Firstly, Jobs wasn’t perfect. He got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. His opinion wasn’t the end of the argument when he was alive, and it’s certainly not now that he’s been dead 14 years.
> But more importantly: Stop putting your opinion in a dead man’s mouth to give it more credibility. It’s ghoulish. Let your opinion stand on its own two feet.
— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44246274
It's impossible to determine with 100% confidence whether or not an image/video was AI generated. If the AI-generated image of Steve Jobs had been copied a bunch on the web, a reverse image search would have turned up lots of sources. Watermarks are imperfect and can be removed. There will always be ambiguity.
So either you're underzealous and if there's ambiguity, you err on the side of treating potentially AI-generated images as real. So now you only catch some deepfakes. This is extra bad because by cracking down on AI-generated content, you condition people to believe any image they see. "If it was AI generated, they would have taken it down by now. It must be real".
The alternative is being overzealous and erring on the side of treating potentially genuine images as AI-generated. Now if a journalist takes a photo of a politician doing something scandalous, the politician can just claim it was AI-generated and have it taken down.
It's a no-win situation. I don't believe that the answer is regulation. It'd be great if we could put the genie back in the bottle, but lots of gen-AI tools are local and open-source, so they will always exist and there's nothing to do be done about it. The best thing is to just treat images and videos with a healthy amount of skepticism.
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If someone I knew generated AI images of me I wouldn't think it was okay
That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager, everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, there are major CTAs that are essentially "black on black" and practically not visible below 50% screen brightness and not acceptably visible at max brightness. Just last night I noticed the browser tabs will render full color content behind the text. It's so bad I've been considering cataloging screenshots and writing about it, because some of it's laughably bad.
The iPhone 5 was revealed a year after Jobs stepped down as CEO and his death shortly after. The design was almost surely locked in while he was still CEO.
The original iPhone had a 2-toned back too.
Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.
In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!
But there's a matter of taste as well as novelty. And while there were many incredible things about Metro, history bears witness to how much Zune and Windows Phone and Windows 8 have become beloved household names in the decade-and-a-half since.
I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
Agree. Jobs took big swings like Liquid Glass but, perhaps the most important part that’s missing in present Apple, he was obsessive about ensuring the swings were executed to a high standard. He was hands on in this pursuit.
It’s actually weird to me that a company so large, so well compensated, so profitable, so prolific, etc can’t seem to care enough about the details without a Jobs-esque foot on their neck type leader to be afraid of.
No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself - it was actually very good in that department, arguably still the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the devices ended up being very limited overall because there were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).
That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen icons didn't look so ugly with black background.
(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)
Until now I blamed Google, but now it seems much more likely that it was Apple’s fault.
Once again in English, please.
Most are still there as Apple has one of the most stable employment places, ever. I know a lot of old senior Apple folks who all come back to Apple to retire as the benefits are good, pay is ok, and it’s beyond stable.
To this end, including the way Apple operates, it’s low noise and low friction to just coast and let the leadership team duke it out over revenue streams.