I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
When iAd launched, it was a $1 million minimum spend just to get onto the platform, they wanted large corporate “lifestyle” brands, Apple exerted creative control over how ads were designed so they could enforce a bunch of user experience guardrails & marketers had no means of independently verifying campaign performance themselves. Their only source was whatever Apple told them. It did not do well. A few years later they tried to salvage it by dropping the minimum spend to $50, removing themselves from the process & making it closer to Google’s AdMob—or approximately as much as Apple was able to early last decade—but it was too little too late. They dropped it by 2016.
When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.
Well, and dozens of other innovations every other company copied, conveniently ignored.
From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI, to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on, to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta, to the first modern touch smartphone, 1 full year before Android came out (and which made Android change its beta design to copy the way iOS worked), to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right, to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip. Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
Modern "services+ads" Apple sucks to the point that I'm moving away, but to say they didn't innovate is laughable.
I don't want to really downplay Apple but there's much better innovation examples that what you listed. One of Apple's great advantages is that it owns the hardware, unlike Linux or Windows. Those have to work in highly heterogeneous environments. I mean Linux runs on everything from a literal potato to a super computer and everything in between.
To highlight Apple's innovation maybe mention things like the iPhone or iPod. They weren't the first devices of their kind but Apple's magic was always the mixture of the two Steves. Technical but stylish. But modern Apple isn't the same. The magic is gone
A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with...
> From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI
Ignored because nobody cares or wanted it.
> to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on
Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
> to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta
That's a remarkable engineering achievement but that's an implementation detail. Backwards compatibility on the desktop was and still is tablesakes.
> to the first modern touch smartphone
Nobody forgot, there's always one of you to remind the class that Apple was first (by your own definition of modern touch smartphone)
> to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right
They were clearly the first to demonstrate that people did indeed want fully wireless despite HN's objections at the time.
> to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip
That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
> Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
I don't know anyone who claims otherwise, and for the longest time they didn't make their own touchpads. So much for being conveniently forgotten.
>A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with... / Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
That explains why someone younger might not see the innovation. But that's on them, the innovation doesn't get erased as an innovation because people take it for granted. If the question is "did Apple innovate", then it includes all those cases, whether some moody Gen A cares for them or not.
Besides, that's not an argument. Apple still has many recent innovations. And we're talking as techies, devs, and products people here, and of various ages. Not just as "people who only ever known Spotify" and never bothered to learn the history of their field. Those wont know what Rosetta or a 5G chip is either anyway.
>That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
A, yes, all those classic Google, Facebook, and MS designed CPUs, that put a fire under Intel/AMD and set the benchmark for future laptop CPUs. You're being disingenuous.
What a bad-faith comment. You just wanted to launch into an anti-Apple lecture and it doesn’t sound like you have the slightest clue about this specific topic. Have you watched the iAds presentation? They’re not like any other advertisements I’ve seen before. CERTAINLY not at the time. You can see exactly why advertisers didn’t bite.
It's probably the single one time where I would actually want ads.
For example roaming the city at 4am on a Saturday and trying to find some place with hot food. Google failed miserably at this. Eventually I found something but just because I knew it was often open at night. It was also marked open on Google Maps but never came up in searches there. Probably other places paid Google more for a listing despite being closed at that time.
Not sure how Apple does with this as I don't have any Apple anymore except a work iPad. It's too limited for me in terms of what I can install. But there's certainly some room for improvement in mapping.
Hah, that Google experience clicking though closed closed closed... Okay fine, i will accept my stupidity for even considering this approach. Wont happen again.
Oh I didn't find it, I have to say I don't use google maps very much. I normally use OSMAnd only. But most businesses don't bother updating their opening hours on openstreetmap.
What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies
Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).
iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.
Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.
What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.
> What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
> There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.
Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.
> Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs.
Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.
There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.
> Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new.
"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.
That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.
"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”
Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
> "Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
> That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing. "If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).
> If I create a messaging app…
Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.
I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.
> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.
> The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?
> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.
We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?
Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.
If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?
> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.
Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.
> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.
We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.
> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS
Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share. People act like Apple was just miraculously granted market share over Blackberry and that they didn’t create a competitive product to earn that spot.
Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.
> Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share.
"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."
Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.
This isn’t permanent. We see the rise and fall of plenty of brands overtime (Nike, Mitsubishi, etc).
If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.
Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?
The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.
Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.
I thought about this in a different context many years back. A friend lent me a GP2X, a Linux based handheld game console. I already had a Nintendo DS, with one of those homebrew cartridges (which I used for the officially advertised purposes, rather than the wink-wink-nudge-nudge purposes). That got me to thinking whether locked down platforms were okay, that they may actually provide opportunities for developers of open systems.
The problem is that history has proven time and time again that it doesn't. While the homebrew scene for the DS was vibrant, even with the barriers, it was lacklustre on the GP2X, even without the barriers. There were likely a lot of reasons for that, but they all pretty much add up to the idea that not buying locked down products will not help.
I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.
Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.
> The average person has no idea what lineageOS is
The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.
Actually they don't work because those apps suck. Typically the banks are responsible for preventing their own apps from working there. Because they don't care or because they follow some bullshit security-theatre policies, or because they just don't understand security, I don't know.
It's not Google that adds the code that makes your banking app fail: it's the goddamn bank itself.
But I agree with your point that the reason it sucks is not the AOSP-based system, and it's sad to blame the system when it's the app (or many times just Google) that is to blame.
And AT&T shouldn't allow you to connect other phones, or modems at all. You should only be able to get a phone by renting it monthly from AT&T - everything else should be illegal.
lol. what an android user comment. “Simply install LineageOS! All you have to do is extract this tarball…”
A solution that’s just for computer nerds is close to no solution at all. It’s certainly not one I care to talk about. I may do it myself, but I don’t for a second consider it in any legitimate discussion about how any non-negligible portion of the market behaves.
When I first switched to Android, I was shocked to see Google's Photos app send me an ad for buying printed printed framed photos. After turning that off, I haven't noticed many ads.
Google Photos is always trying to upsell storage beyond 15GB: "(you're going to lose your pictures), turn on backup?". Even pressing the "Search" button got me that prompt once, with some blah blah that AI-assisted search only works when the photos are on the cloud...
> What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
We're on HN. If you're on Android and seeing ads then you're doing something wrong.
I don't disagree with your main point, but the H is important context here
BTW, in iPhone I tend to get lots of ads because Safari doesn't have ad block, I can't repackage APKs, can't edit DNS, not to mention all the spam calls/texts (especially from icloud emails...). Thank God the ublock folks got an iPhone app. I mean it isn't a fair comparison, a rooted Android vs stock iPhone, but it's trivial to root a pixel and on an iPhone I can't even access my photos from a terminal emulator... so there's no fair comparison that can be made
I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it
It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.
Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.
Which Android though? AOSP doesn't have ads. But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services (McAfee VPN, McAfee security scan, OneDrive, etc.). I heard that Chinese phones are similar. Even Pixel pushes Google One in places.
The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).
I have used several models of Sony Compact phones, until Sony discontinued that line of products, then ASUS phones.
No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.
The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.
> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage
Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.
My stock Pixel phone has zero ads. It prompts you to enable things like Wallet and all the AI stuff, but I just turned that off, and it's not bothering me anymore. There are no persitent ads.
I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).
Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)
Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.
It's worse than that. Google Photos sends push notifications telling you to buy photo books and prints unless you opt out. Play Books also sends push notifications telling you to buy particular books; it's also opt out. I'm semi-certain other built-in apps like YouTube and the Play Store do the same.
However, once you turn all that junk off, the Pixel experience is pretty good.
Why would you even enable notifications on these apps?
I'm on GrapheneOS, so they are not enabled by default, but I think on Google certified Android you can also switch them off. Also, besides that, if apps implement notifications nicely, they are nicer on Android, because you can turn on/off notifications per category/channel. Of course, some apps just put everything together.
> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.
Does anyone use the App Store other than to search for an already known app name? I probably have not in over a decade, and I can't see a reason I ever would.
Best part of searching the App Store for something you know is that even though the hamming distance between the search term and the thing you want is 0, the thing you want will not be at the top of results anyway.
This causes me so many issues. Rolling out multi-factor authentication and having some no-name random app show up as the first result for "microsoft authenticator" is downright malicious behavior on the part of the app store.
I used to. In the "golden days" of "there's an app for that", I would peruse the App Store looking for new games. I spend hundreds of dollars on games doing that. Now, the only games you see really are shovelware or subscription garbage.
“iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users—a highly desirable demographic for advertisers—and provide developers a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low cost applications.”
Don’t mix apples with oranges Steve was The Apple those guys are CE—replaceable-O-ranges. If board and shareholders want ads there is no one to tell them get lost anymore.
Search on the app store sucks too. I haven't been able to find either a way to search for only apps that charge for downloads (I don't want to watch an ad for features, or nickel and dimed on IAP), or some kind of "minimum price" slider I can use.
That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.
"Stop guessing. AppRaven(.app) shows you what people really search for on the App Store, what they complain about in the apps that already exist, and hands you a plan you can start coding today."
> I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.
Sorry. For some reason got him mixed up with Steve Lemay lol.
But still.
Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye or Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.
Even here.
Joh Termus was just picked up randomly out of a box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to checks notes lead all of Apple.
Read the original comment: "I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.".
I mean. John Ternus and other execs and senior management had nothing to do anything with it. They were all new, picked up randomly out of the box and only obligingly did the bidding of Tim Cook (or Alan Dye, or both).
Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.
The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.
Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.
Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.
> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt
Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.
Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?
If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?
It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.
Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.
I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).
Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…
it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.
> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
I think some of it just that different people have different priorities. Some of what protected Apple was vanity. I think Steven Jobs cared about how people saw him and his products. He wanted to be the guy who made a premium product that he thought was cool and was proud of. The longer time went on, the less Apple execs cared about what he would have wanted and started caring more about what they wanted.
I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.
Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.
I think the Apple Effect was largely a result of personal narcissism.
Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.
The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.
Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.
The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.
The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.
Steven Jobs definitely cared about the polish as a reflection of himself. He wanted people to associate the name Steven Jobs with apple. When people thought of apple they thought of Steven Jobs. He didn't want to put the name of his company on anything unpolished or tasteless because people would associate that with Steven Jobs, since everyone knew Steven Jobs had the final say.
I think it's not just Apple. Everyone and every company seem to become greedier and greedier. Economically, the world is not in a great place, apart from a minority which just gets richer and richer.
While I don't know, my suspicion is that the market is saturated, but the company is still hungry for "numbers go up".
"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.
It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?
I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?
I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.
I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.
> I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.
But you can just use the browser with an adblocker for Youtube on the phone, which also allows you to play audio in the background for free e.g. for playing music, what's the point in using the app at all?
> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
From what I've seen of GrapheneOS, it's not a luxury product, it's a product for tinkerers, who don't mind finicky granular configs. If I'm paying a premium, I expect sensible, privacy respecting, defaults that I can use out of the box. Not constant fumbles until everything is "setup".
I think you have a wrong idea about GrapheneOS. You install the sandboxed Play Store/Services through their app store and then it's pretty much the same as any other Android phone. Except that it doesn't get in your face with preinstalled crap (Google, Apple, or Samsung). On the GrapheneOS forums there are a lot of non-technical people that install GrapheneOS and don't have many issues. The primary annoyance is Google's abuse of their monopoly with Play Integrity.
I would say it often feels more like a luxury product than an iPhone or Google-certified Android phone because it's not full of cheesy stuff. It's what iPhone and Pixel would look like if Apple/Google didn't want to push you: subscriptions, AI, movie/music apps, etc.
I don't think there's any defaults you need to change out of the box besides installing the apps you want.
But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.
As someone who has daily driven both side by side as much as I love GOS, AOSP / Android absolutely does not feel premium compared to iOS. Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS. And the FOSS apps on Android are extremely subpar in terms of feel compared to iOS (off the top of my head look at how bad the Fossify Contacts app is compared to Google Contacts) but that’s the trade-off.
I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS.
Sorry, but no.
I also have an iPhone for $REASONS. Both my prior iPhone Air and my new iPhone 18 Pro still frequently stutters. Even scrolling some settings screens (which are very simple), I can often see frames getting dropped. Apple apps like the App Store are one huge frame-dropfest (even if you let it preload all assets). Apple can't get a nearly 1500 Euro phone with the fastest single-core performance and probably the fastest GPU to render normal window chrome smoothly anymore.
My P10P with GrapheneOS, which only has a midrange SoC by modern standards (don't believe what Google tells you) and it is buttery smooth.
iOS got even more terrible with Liquid Glass, so many things are badly readable, even with the slider set to completely opaque in iOS 27.
iOS used to be premium compared to Android. But Apple enshittified iOS over the last few years. Even most Apple pundits agree.
Since people seem to disagree because they simply cannot see it, here are two recordings at 0.5x speed so that even people who are not sensitive to stutters can see it:
When I see "polish" they're usually referring to the opposite of things like this. They seem to like sluggish UI as long as it's "smooth" (not "fast") and has flashy animations.
Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.
No android auto? What are you basing this on? I ask because I am responding from grapheneos while connected to android auto, and I am concerned I am in the wrong universe again.
It does. You do have to install it (GrapheneOS provides a Play Store Sandbox to install google apps to) intentionally, it is not installed by default. Perhaps that tripped up the author of the misinformation you came across?
In any case, it is a fantastic OS with many of the annoyances of Android removed. (Scoped file permissions are fantastic, for example) If you are on the fence, I'd suggest giving it a shot. Replacing a phone OS might seem scary, but it is really pretty similar to use.
There is Android Auto. There's contactless payments in Europe through Curve, Paypal, and some specific banks. Some companies are working on bringing them to the US.
Funny enough, the only part of Apple Pay I use with any frequency is the browser/app integration part, basically as a much more convenient alternative to PayPal sometimes.
IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.
I agree about cash, but we are talking about a luxury experience. In fact, GrapheneOS has talked about it [1].
> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance
I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.
In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.
At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.
> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!
Soon enough they'll be asking you to pay for Storage Space Pro (lets you open the trunk) and Intelligent Manual Media Control (lets you slightly lower the volume of ads that automatically blast out of all the speakers when the car is on)
I haven’t worked for Apple but you’re definitely correct. Just compare what Jobs said about using a stylus with how happy the company was to announce that you could use Apple Pencil with the iPhone duo. It is self-evident. It’s far from the company Jobs once ran.
You’re misunderstanding that quote. “If you saw a stylus they blew it!” referred to requiring a stylus to interact with the touch display. Having one optional, mainly for drawing, isn’t quite the same thing.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
Yes, and it makes sense to add the stylus/pencil after app developers had to learn how to deal with finger taps only. Apple did the same thing with the original Mac. There were no arrow keys on the first model, so that developers were forced to accommodate the mouse.
Steve Jobs also repeatedly dissed the idea of an iPod that played video as late as one year before they started selling the iPod Video. I wouldn't take any of his stated opinions as gospel.
I like being able to use Procreate or other image editing software on my iPad, and the only reason I’d consider a foldable in the first place is because I’d like to use it like I use my iPad. What’s so bad about having the option to use a stylus? Who cares what a dead tech oligarch once thought of styluses? Especially when the state of the technology wasn’t where it’s at now. If you could ask Jobs now, maybe he would have changed his mind.
That's not a given. Visionary people sometimes go mildly insane over time. Source: worked at VKontakte and Telegram and watched it slowly happen to Durov.
Questionable features like being able to delete anything in the conversation on both sides. Tacky UI choices like liquid glass on Android or the excessive use of Lottie animations every-damn-where. All while being completely deaf to feedback, both from within the team (any criticism makes you "toxic") and from the public. The way he treats his employees isn't exactly good either.
But you can no longer trust Telegram that things you had in your chat will still be there tomorrow. This feature feels like someone has hacked into your device and deleted files they didn't like.
"Your" chat consists of other people's messages too and they own those. You can also delete your messages on Discord or Slack – it's quite normal as a feature.
Firstly, I'm talking about PMs, not group chats. Group chats have different requirements because they have to be moderated.
Of course, I have nothing against being able to delete your own messages for both. A time limit within which you can do that is nice but I can live without one. But Telegram lets you delete every message in any PM conversation, including incoming ones, for both people. Or even the entire conversation, and make it disappear from the other person's list without a trace.
Jobs has long been vocal about protecting the user experience. Not 100% sure if it's true, but I heard Jobs was originally opposed to custom apps running on the iPhone (the App Store), because he 'didn't want to turn iPhone in Windows'.
Jobs was right. Apps are so shitty now I don't even bother. Everything has a subscription now and there's so much noise its hard to actually find signal on the appstore.
It wouldn't have died - most apps are still just a thin UI over a corresponding online service, and most of the data and services proprietary APIs provide ended up achievable in a browser too. It is really just the internet that makes apps and smartphones useful.
All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
Early on it was different with a lot more stuff actually running locally vs cloud service era. App store predated that for a little bit actually. There weren't microtransactions initially either. What you'd call a AAA game for that platform back then would actually be $9.99 one time payment.
Indeed. That’s what resulted in Apple beingn different than competition. Too bad Apple engineers were reprimanded and publicly humiliated, sometimes with no fault. But Jobs had a vision that’s been long gone from Apple and it really shows. Sometimes I wonder if Jobs himself would be corrupted by Apple’s success but I’ll never know the answer to that…
Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).
In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.
Exactly, not "even", these huge companies have to squeeze money out of everything. To keep their growth rates up, they have to make bigger and bigger swings.
Exits to where? I personally I dialed down my phone use to a minimum. I still use Iphone just because I see no better alternative for my sporadic use. I use few apps minimally and install almost nothing, i can't remember when I last visited the app store.
Well you took the exit to "using my phone less", which is good for you, bad for Apple (less service revenue, probably less frequent hardware sales from you)
I bet you there is a CEO and friends version that is absolutely add-free.
The problem is the shareholders getting value from add adds now, while reducing the value of apple shares in the long run, by allowing a new premium producer to emerge.
It's not a root account issue, it's that they have already bought all the services there are to buy. One would assume that once you buy a service, they would stop prompting you to buy it.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
No, hardening has nothing to do with it. They have a feature flag system deeply embedded in their software. And such systems can totally distribute different flags to different people. And that's how you could easily create VIP accounts with different behaviors than the rest of the world, like all ad festures turned off.
I guess it was simply too close to reality. That's why I didn't register that as humor. Text also doesn't carry tone of voice well, which makes confusion more likely
It is because of things like that that i'm using Android. I feel like one of those boomers having no clue about tech whenever i am handed an iphone: everything feels like a trick, a set of secret gestures and recipes that everybody has mastered but me.
Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.
Can't say I agree - I honestly tried using an iPhone for a few weeks, and I still couldn't reliably get where I wanted, because there's a good chance some input on the way would suddenly result in a totally different effect.
It feels like 80% of the UI has non-obvious overloads. I must have either skipped the tutorial or been too blind to find it, because otherwise these things are anything but intuitive. I've never struggled as much with any Android device, even with exotic manufacturer UIs.
It's true of android too, you're just used to it. Even Graphene eliminated the back button, and makes you swipe left from the right side instead, and the app switcher and home buttons, and makes you swipe up-right from the bottom.
No, I genuinely have not encountered the same reliability issues on any Android devices, even on my very first one.
I'm not a big fan of such gestures (mostly due to discoverability), but the few times I've used an Android without the navbar the gestures still felt reliable, even if I had trouble remembering them.
I got a Pixel 10, installed GrapheneOS. Then Google Play (which is sandboxed). I have 99,9% of all apps and a barebones launcher and some barebones fossify apps. Its pretty good, ugly if you let it but not bad
Wow, I read it as "John Temu", which seems to be what Apple is being turned into.
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
I knew we were cooked when Costco started upselling its cookies at the self-checkout food court.
I think it really speaks to the situation we've gotten ourselves into. Capitalism requires us to constantly grow but I think the problem is we're myopic and believe we need to grow faster and faster. With the high concentration of power these companies have the easiest lever to pull is by making a service worse and having users pay for a better experience. That's a very different strategy than offering new products and/or features.
I call this myopic because it really only works when there's little to no competition but using it too much causes more backlash and causes people to get pissed enough to become the competition (and not sell out). I think Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play here. People aren't aligned with the goals of the organization. To be honest, it's hard to think of any company where it's clear the leaders, let alone employees, are dedicated to the goals of the company[0].
It's really sad too, since all these big companies seem to just be a shell of what they used to be. They used to be inspiring and it was exciting to see all the change and innovation. But it just seems to be more and more disappointment lately. Small changes so people can push their small org's status. No one taking any risks to really push things forward. These companies cornered the markets, have trillion dollar evaluations, yet act like they're poor. That boy ain't right...
[0] don't give me that nonsense of "the goal is to make money". The comment is about myopia. If this is your first reaction, you're being myopic and missing my point. You're welcome to disagree, but don't strawman
Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.
I have a script to add an /etc/hosts entry for `127.0.0.1 gdmf.apple.com` and that seems to eliminate any nagging, just remove when it's time to update.
Sounds like an unauthorized access of my computer - a fine of a dollar per byte, per person, should make Apple turn the hell around. 15 billion dollars times how many Apple users that have been wronged in this manner? Apple would be dead instantly.
I think you'll find that you agreed to it somewhere in their voluminous terms of service.
I looked it up and indeed, it's in section 1, paragraph C:
Your Device will periodically check with Apple for Apple Software Changes. If a change is available, the change may automatically download and install onto your Device
and, if applicable, your peripheral devices. By using the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and install automatic Apple Software Changes onto your Device and your peripheral devices.
He said it's "unauthorized access of his computer", even though he implicitly authorized it by clicking through the agreement (apparently without reading it).
If people actually read these clickthrough agreements and started sending devices back when they don't agree, it would encourage the industry to change.
No one "needs" an iPhone, they can support one of the open source phones with far less onerous terms.
You can still consider it unauthorized, if you do not consider the authorization to be valid in the first place. I can also get people to sign away their life on a contract, that's not going to mean anything, because signing away your life is not possible in the first place.
> If people actually read these clickthrough agreements
I would live in such a world too, but that is a fairy tale. In a lot of situations, you don't get to see the contract before you have signed it. I had the situation in a bank contract. The bank clerk tells me it's mandatory, to sign that waiver, I tell her it's not. She won't sign the main contract, until I signed that waiver. I tell her that's illegal. Doesn't matter. After I signed it, I get to read the waiver, it clearly states, that it is not mandatory, and whether it gets signed does not have any effect on the main contract, as is required by law (with citation).
Because of these things, the laws says some things can't be established and most other things must be established with informed consent. It's on the company to ensure that this is collected. No, a tick on "I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions" is not informed consent.
Honestly, we don't need any law changes actually, because most of these things the tech companies do is plain illegal in every step.
The Regional Court of Berlin held in a judgment of 16 January 2018 (docket no. 16 O 341/15, German language version of the judgment available here) that Facebook's default privacy settings and parts of their terms and conditions were invalid. This judgment provides important guidance on consent and transparency.
Background
The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (Federation) sued Facebook and requested cease and desist regarding some of its default settings and terms and conditions.
The Federation argued that Facebook's default settings violated the requirement of explicit consent. For example, the default settings included a location service in Facebook's mobile app revealing the location of the person that the user is chatting to. In addition, boxes were pre-activated allowing search engines to link to the user's timeline.
The Federation also argued that various clauses in the terms and conditions of Facebook were invalid, including clauses that provide consent of the user (i) to transferring personal data to and processing personal data in the U.S. and (ii) using the name and profile picture of the user for commercial, sponsored or related content.
Judgment of the Regional Court of Berlin
First, the Regional Court of Berlin found that five default settings were invalid because the requirements of informed consent were not fulfilled. The court stated that informed consent requires that an organization must provide comprehensive information about the background and the scope of the consent in order for the consent to be based on an entirely free decision of the user. Default settings cannot be regarded as informed consent if the user is not explicitly and actively notified of the default settings in the registration procedure. Facebook did not sufficiently ensure that the user was aware of the default settings. The court noted that a "virtual privacy tour" that Facebook offered, but that was not mandatory, did not change this. Not every user would make use of this privacy tour and "realistically", most of the users would not further review the privacy settings.
Next, the court held that the consent declarations in the terms and conditions were not transparent and therefore the users were not able to give informed consent. With regard to the consent to the transfer of personal data to the United States, the court observed that the user was not informed about which categories of personal data were transferred, why they were transferred, how they are further used in the U.S. and which standards of data security are applied. Further, the court concluded that the consent language for using the name and profile picture for commercial, sponsored or related content was not transparent. The extent of the usage of the name and profile picture was not clear for the user and not further explained. The court noted that the example that was provided in the consent wording (i.e., use for a brand that the user likes) was not sufficient information about the scope of the consent.
IMO the notion that such one-sided agreements are not made under duress needs to die in a fire. I wish there were a viable grassroots political movement to remove the corporate boot from our neck; until that point, fuck these terms of servitude and every abuse they enable.
The nagging notifications are only a small part. Apple has far more effective ways of forcing updates on you. On iPhones, for instance, the Unicode tables ship with the OS version, so unless you update, you cannot render newly added emoji codepoints. Given how central emojis have become to pop culture - and how determined the Unicode Consortium seems to keep adding more of them - the whole situation almost looks like a conspiracy, if you squint. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In the App Store, Apple won't let you filter for apps compatible with your iOS version. So sooner or later, you have to manually try installing every search result just to see whether it errors out. There's no explanation for not adding such a trivial filter other than to annoy users on purpose. Without jailbreaking, you also can't install earlier (compatible) versions of a given app. And by the way, updating iOS eventually just turns into buying a new iPhone, once the latest iOS no longer supports your device at all.
But the worst part is how critical software components are bundled with the OS too. On iPhone, that means WebKit. So very soon your Internet browsing experience starts to rot, because the only way to get a version supporting the latest Web standards is to update the whole of iOS. Likewise, on Macs, your runtimes/frameworks are bundled as well, so you can't update them individually. Eventually, the only way to install even non-native apps is to update the whole macOS.
This is what you sign up for when you buy an Apple product. Apple has mastered the art of tempting you without letting you realize what's really going on until it's too late. Apple was, is, and always will be evil. The clue is in their logo.
> Apple has far more effective ways of forcing updates on you
Let's not forget forcing physical upgrades: a new .x update of iOS that suddenly decides a bit of hardware is now broken and bricks the phone. Apple Store said £400 plus to fix despite my explaining it was their update that bricked it - every component was working fine
I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
To me, the worst part is when GTK introduced what's known as "client-side decorations"[0], because that means that I can't use my normal window manager decorations.
If I force them on with something like gtk3-nocsd[1], then although I get my normal window manager decorations back, sometimes the client-side decorations have actual important widgets in them like menu buttons. When that happens, I end up with windows that have both kinds of decorations, and it looks weird.
For me this means that it's not nice to use apps like Meld and Remmina.
My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
GNOME devs have a fixation on putting too much whitespace in every UI. They also conform so eagerly to the "Free Software UI" essay preachings---particularly the section, "Standing Up To User Pressure"[1]---thus they find it effortless to defend not fixing poorly presented frontends.
(My own app menu on a 24" monitor at 100% scale has: "LibreOffic..." as well as "LibreOffic..." and the very useful, underrated "LibreOffic...". I also often use "KiCad G...", "KiCad P...", and "KiCad S..." but usually never "KiCad I..." or "KiCad P...")
Debian Trixie so Gnome 48 or so. Yes, program names truncated in the overview but when I hold mouse pointer over the icon, the full name appears. Not ideal, but I'm assuming borderline acceptable for discovery of applications by examining their icons.
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
It bothers me so much that Gnome is like this. The Gnome ecosystem has several programs and workflows that are, at least as far as I can see it, solved. Other than minor upkeep and and a new feature once a blue moon, they're done, and in an elegant manner. But I can't actually use Gnome itself, because the larger experience is nonsense to my brain, with questions like yours coming up every time I try to use it, which makes actually using it willingly a complete non-starter.
It's as if an alien made it, and they nailed certain subtasks, just because the requirements are simple and the path to something that works well is straight and clear, but the larger experience doesn't have many concrete requirements, and thus the road leads to something that does technically work, but which nobody* would want to use.
*Obviously some people like Gnome. Their brains don't seem to work the way mine does though.
this is a fair point. I am referring to more "objective" things, if anything can be, in design. Let's take as an example the alt+tab behaviour with multiple virtual desktops. In GNOME, as it is in Windows too by the way, alt+tab cycles inside the virtual desktop you're in, allowing for efficient matrix-like navigation, and allowing to split tasks between desktops. On Mac OS, alt+tab cycles on all your open programs, making you jump between desktops. To me, this is rather unintuitive. It could be habit, but there is a clear difference in result regardless of habits, and I think the most productive choice is the GNOME-Windows one, and the more "intuitive" one in the sense of what a user might expect out of a virtual desktop, that is, creating a new desktop with its own apps. Of course this is my impression and I am well free not to buy a Mac :)
Debian Trixie Gnome 48 or so. In Settings | Multitasking right down the bottom there is App Switching with two options: 'Include Apps from all workspaces' and 'Include Apps from the current workspace only'. Debian has the all workspaces option set by default. Gnome Tweaks is installed, and the extensions to have minimise and maximise buttons on the right of windows are switched on by default.
(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).
You can do that same thing just a little different way. Say you want to go through all open apps in one desktop. On my mac its 3 fingers scroll up on trackpad then all windows are exposed. Basically the same function as what you want. Yes technically you are clicking on a window not the application icon but who cares.
Yeah, Apple's OS is clearly not designed for keyboard/mouse users. Triggering this on a standard keyboard requires using both hands (Ctrl-up arrow) and then switching to the mouse. Super annoying.
On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.
“Requires” is a strong word. Apple does have an extremely easy mouse-only solution for this and it dates back over a decade: map the fan-out selector (I forget what they call it these days, maybe Mission Control?) to a “hot corner”.
My experience was the same. GNOME is by and far imo the best DE on Linux when it comes to consistency and being the most accessible to non-technical users. However it’s far, far behind macOS’ UX.
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
The whole GNOME 2 being replaced with Unity thing turned me away from desktop Linux entirely. I don't care if KDE or whatever exists now, I just want there to be one clearly most popular DE that does something reasonable.
Okay, I guess, but that's a social wish about the preferences of others. It makes about at much sense as me wishing you just liked KDE. And at any rate it's not a technical or design wish that any software developer or team thereof can fix per se.
- macOS doesn't natively support "alt tab"-like behaviour (Cmd-Tab and Cmd+` are not analogous). You need something like alt-tab.app.
- You can't have the trackpad use "natural scrolling" and an external mouse use "normal scrolling" at the same time. The setting applies to all devices at once, so you need an external app (like LinearMouse) to use it.
That said, it's not like OSs and DEs don't have annoying things you need to fix (eg adding plugins to fix GNOME weirdness).
Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to use GNOME. There are a ton of window managers that run on Linux, and you can find one that works better for you.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
Mac is just a different philosophy. Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management. That is possible for you. There are several tools for this, e.g. Amethyst.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
> Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management.
Not really. None of the "window managers" for macOS actually play the role of compositors on Wayland or window managers on X11. macOS has exactly one window manager, plus a bunch of apps that run automation against it and sometimes call themselves "window manager".
> This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Most window managers (and the vast majority of the popular ones) on Linux are also like this. It's called a "floating window manager". Tiling window managers are cool but they're marginal even on Linux.
I spend time in the digital realm because I hate paper. Paper is a horrible analogue with real world limitations we should have left behind in the 90s.
interesting point, but in a real desktop, or multi-desktop setup, you can have different things on each one and look at them one by one, by table. The alt+tab default behaviour on MacOS is not that. This is my problem with their design choice.
There's such thing as one DE being less convenient than other, but it's far less important than it being reliable and easy to get help with. We've changed DEs at work a couple of times, and it's never because of usability, it's because the old one became unsupported or wasn't compatible with something.
Same with X11 vs Wayland. I don't care which, I just want the one that works, and want to never hear about the other one again. Linux Mint comes with X11. It didn't work on my fairly standard PC because of something about graphics switching.
It's linux, you can do everything in the terminal. I've never understood what purpose a "desktop" serves.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
> Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities
Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.
These days I can say the same, I used to enjoy trying to minimize my mouse usage and fiddling with tiling window managers but now I just can't be bothered.
And the weird thing is that the type of mental effort required is not even a useful one per se, it's more like a strain (to me) than something that makes me sharper.
Still some things are easier in a GUI while others in a CLI, just depends on their nature and how often do you have to engage with them. But after a while navigating windows by Alt+Tab (Alt+`) or the mouse is fine really. I don't care to reach for Super+PgDown/PgUp when I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and scroll to change the workspace.
That’s a good way of putting it. CLI skills are specialized skills that I’m not going to use for anything else, whereas using a desktop environment is re-using skills I already have for other purposes.
Even when I do write code, I spend more time thinking about the code than actually writing so losing time to using my mouse doesn’t matter.
Do you adjust audio settings in the terminal? I've been moving away from using my mouse but anything related to audio or display settings intimidates me.
If I want to start a program I can click its icon in the taskbar, if I want to see my files I can click the file manager in the taskbar, and since these actions are done with the mouse I can simultaneously lie back in bed while eating trifle with a long spoon.
Mostly yeah. The DE does manage the browser's windows and notifications if you use those. The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox, there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
> The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox
I was imprecise. I am solely talking about using a terminal emulator program on a display server, I wasn't talking about refraining from using anything outside a VTE. That would be pointless, yeah.
> there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
My point is that it is. Typing 'firefox' is way simpler to open the program, than traversing an application list and selecting it. The latter can become faster once you have a shortcut, but then it's equivalent to 'f<TAB>' or '!!' and the like. Language is more versatile, that's why we use it for fast communication. If you want the scissors from someone, you tell them, you don't make gestures or draw a picture, because that's way more work (unless you are mute).
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
I got a third party replacement battery in my iPhone. The battery works just fine and the reason is simple, I no longer live in the US, where the phone was purchased, and if I want to keep my 2 eSIM slots, then I can't get the phone fixed in Hong Kong. Anyone who thinks Apple is very convenient has never lived in multiple countries, imo.
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
> Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
Simpler than that: money and control.
Marked up replacement parts for and the inability to compete because “not Apple certified” comes with disabled features.
The best part of market capitalism, no market! Pure profits because we make the rules!
Europe has a long tail of MNOs and MVNOs that don't support eSIM well enough. In China, SIM activation requires visiting a store, ID verification etc. so they only recently added eSIMs, and with limits: only Chinese iPhones can install a Chinese eSIM, and foreign eSIMs cannot be installed onto a Chinese iPhone while you're physically in mainland China.
I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.
Same here, I’ve gone from Apple fanboy to slowly dropping all of my Apple products as it becomes time for new purchases. They are just no longer looking at users like me. They keep focusing their efforts on things I don’t care about, while locking me out of control over my system more and more each macOS release. That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old… why bother fighting that?
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
> That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.
This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.
Yes they do offer security updates for what, 7 years? That I consider “kind of ok.” Not great. And yes most Android phones are even worse than that. But OS and application updates? You’re dead to them after 4 or 5 years. AND the whole ecosystem follows suit, so if your Mac is like 6 years old, almost nobody is writing software that works on your system anymore.
I’ve managed to move all of my inner circle family and friends to Signal. We always had one holdout android user and now we don’t care that he’s on android. As a bonus, because I’m on a computer much of the day, I can use a keyboard to send signal messages.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
I just got my kid a cheap flip phone that isn't as dumb as I wanted, because it's got KaiOS, a FireFox OS offshoot. An undiscovered country with just a few thousand apps in their store, and a web framework to make your own. If HN would get into it like it's an e-ink display, we could have all the little apps we need, and no ads or distractions.
I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.
I have no loyalty, I've switched back and forth several times. I haven't concluded that either is better than the other, just different (and these days, not really -that- different). Though I do appreciate the tight integration between the iPhone and my MBP, that is definitely a sticky feature.
Same here. Owned every initial iPhone but went to Pixel a little while back and it's a much better experience.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
right now I have the same feeling; some time ago I felt that entering the iPhone "mindset" made sense as you could gain in ease of use by sacrificing some "control".
Me too. Android for the most part has much better UI.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+
I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
I feel like Apple is always pushing the dev side forward in pretty awesome but small ways.
I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking
There's the experimental Fairydust Branch which lets you connect a monitor via USB-C. However if you want to use more than one external monitor DisplayLink is currently the only option that works reasonably well. Unless you have a Mac with an HDMI port in which case you can use it.
HDMI out works great on M1 and M2 chips, and DP alt mode output is nearly ready, and works if you compile an experimental kernel. I daily drive an Asahi Linux ALARM M1 Pro macbook, and I have almost zero complaints.
> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
> Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.
No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
>Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities,
The whole iOS and Android keep copying each other and without someone like Steve being the editor they became pretty similar.
I want an iOS that is SIMPLE. And the software Apple is offering right now is anything but simple. Homescreen is now clustered mess. And for every banks, resturatnts all want an App for themselves, either you skip all the discounts and functions or now you have more clutter to deal with.
IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.
Agreed, I swapped to iPhone about 4 years ago, because I couldn't find a phone for myself from a tons of options(one company did that, another did something else, etc..).
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I honestly miss my Windows Phone, solid performance and battery life. The platform was never big enough for there to be much issue with third party apps and I could write what ever software I wanted and load it onto the phone without too much pain.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
There have been third party app stores on Android pretty much forever.
Including app stores installed out of the box on GMS certified devices like the Samsung Galaxy Store (alongside the Play Store).
It just means they will be easier to install via the Play Store without sideloading (making other commercial stores more attractive but not really my cup of tea), and some minor API changes (although auto updating was added even before the ruling so not sure what else there might be).
Personally I'm not concerned about the changes to sideloading since it's a one time mild inconvenience. So I struggle to understand how going to iOS in protest (which doesn't allow persistent sideloading at all without workarounds) makes any sense whatsoever.
Google's original plan would have been really bad, but the new approach is a complete non-issue for me.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.
The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.
There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.
Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.
I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.
Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.
My biggest gripe with windows is it will steal your cursor focus from password prompts. And when it surfaces a password prompt, it does not focus it automatically.
I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.
Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
> Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that
It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).
> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.
It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.
> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.
> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great
The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.
> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder
The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.
> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.
> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.
I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?
The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.
It makes sense to me as well, but mostly because I’m familiar with the UI in-and-of-itself. This is a website for computer programmers mostly, we’re exactly the wrong people to ask if a UI is intuitive.
OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!
I love MacOS and it’s my primary OS and I couldn’t agree with you more on every single one of your points.
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
I remember Tiger. Leopard was such a huge upgrade for it. I mean spaces alone, come on, that was huge. All the trackpad gesture control came after Tiger too with the larger unibody trackpads.
The keyboard shortcuts are way more inconsistent on Mac. On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as entities. No such rule of thumb exists in Mac.
The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
Keyboard shortcuts on Mac are a lot more consistent than windows and Linux actually. On a Mac command + C / V is copy / paste. In Linux sometimes it’s control + c, sometimes it’s control + shift + c.
I guess what I mean to say is that there's no consistent paradigm for keyboard shortcuts. It's a lot more memorization and less real pattern to what keyboard shortcut will do what action.
And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.
That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.
Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.
These keyboard shortcuts are also used in emacs; I'm not sure if that's the source of their inclusion in MacOS or if they have a common ancestor between them.
What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?
The difference is when the current paragraph of text has line wrapped. Home on Windows goes back to the start of the current line, Ctrl+A on Mac goes back to the start of the current paragraph.
I have used a lot of systems, and inside them a lot of programs (I make design choices for a living, even if they are at a lower level, UX and intuitiveness exists also in libraries). I was comparing Mac OS to GNOME and not to Windows because Windows is almost the same as Mac OS relative to my point, just worse.
It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.
>> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.
The only thing I could figure is that maybe they weren’t familiar with Gnome (which is like, fair enough, I don’t know what the window manager in Windows is called) so they thought the next sentence was irrelevant or something?
Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form.
They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!
My daughter recently left me with her old M1 Macbook Air when she went to college. I decided to give Fedora Asahi Remix a try. It was great seeing that the install process was a simple "pipe curl to sh" from a domain I suppose I have to trust anyway. The most technical part of the install was making sure I waited long enough for the machine to shut down and then holding the power button until "Loading startup options…” appeared on the screen, popping in my local macOS username/password a handful of times along the way while the scripts did their thing.
To be fair, I did in fact get a "Donate to GNOME" interstitial shortly after I first logged in. My agent was able to disable that without too much trouble. I find it obnoxious that GNOME gets to grab my attention for a donation just because they control my UI, while the thousands of other developers who wrote key parts of my OS don't get the same privilege.
That aside, I'm absolutely thrilled with the combination of Apple hardware and Linux software. I can see this being my default "mobile device with a keyboard." It doesn't yet work with my external display, but rumor has it the folks at Asahi having been making strides on that this year. Until then my Framework and Thinkpad both have some more utility as workhorse machines.
I suppose M2 is the most recent platform that has "good enough" Linux support from Asahi, but my M1 fits the bill for most everything I want to do on a mobile device with an attached keyboard. I might pick up an M3 with 24GB to replace it at some point if the Asahi team can get external monitors, GPU acceleration, and sleep working well on that chip.
No doubt it's anything but perfect, but I can give anecdata that my M1 just slept overnight while not plugged in, and I had 99% charge just now when I opened it up to check HN.
Whenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them.
They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.
Apple doesn't care. Most people ignore the ads, which is why Apple can keep adding them to first-party apps without pushback. Rage-protesting ad campaigns probably pumps the Apple ads KPIs.
There will never be a mea culpa from Apple because this has long been their end goal. Tim Cook made it extremely clear that services would be an internal pivot for Apple. It's a lifeline for their quarterly reports, a neverending frontier of captive users that all pay a premium to participate in status games. Apple customers might be the most lucrative advertising audience in the world, all Apple has to do is "protect" them from the bad advertisements and expose curated, trusted promotions that Apple users are sure to love. Then they sell it as part of the trust ecosystem, so that anyone questioning the value of advertisements gets called a malcontent that wants to force Apple users into an wild-west maelstrom of disrespectful, uncurated ads.
This sort of false equivocation "oh-we-can't-fix-it" attitude is how Apple kept their App Store monopoly, and it's how they continue to deny ecosystem integration to respectful alternative software. It's an insult to capable users and the core reason why I had to leave the ecosystem. There is no reason to pay a price premium versus Microsoft if my OEM begs me to Try the new Safari! or Get Three Months of <garbage you don't want> for FREE! My blood pressure goes up just remembering the stupid shit that Microsoft and Apple imposed onto "my" computer.
I mean, News is a collection of newspapers who pretty famously have supported themselves via advertising basically since forever, so complaining about ads in News to me is like complaining that a hamburger combo on a fast food menu includes soda. If you read the news, you get ads is a pretty normal social contract.
Sure, and the App Store is traditionally a place where advertisements appear above top search results. That's a normalized social contract, and it fucking sucks. It's a deliberately misleading design pattern that prioritizes ad sales over user clarity and immediacy. iTunes and Quicktime were never half as scummy as their modern counterparts are.
If you continue down this road of legitimizing user-hostile design, you will sacrifice everything you love about Apple. It's a Procrustean bed upon which good apps are hammered into service revenue.
My unpleasant introduction to Apple Maps ads recently was opening it to look for nearby restaurants, and seeing an ad for a domestic violence lawyer nearby. Apple has now lost all credibility when it comes to respecting the user, not that they had much left at this point.
What I don't understand is that all of our data is being gathered everywhere for decades now, but the ads are still not targeted with any degree of precision.
Apple is not at Google’s level of surveillance-based adware. With these new changes to Maps, they now have new incentives to eventually catch up, but their targeting is bad because they suck at targeting, because they built their business around not collecting all that data & displaying targeted ads.
That said, if that’s the direction they’re going, I don’t need to help encourage them. I deleted Apple Maps off my phone & iPad, & switched back to Google Maps after like 10 years on Apple Maps. The hardware I buy is expensive enough & has profit margins high enough that Apple should never be trying to show me ads—targeted or otherwise—inside the basic functionality of their phones, and Maps is very much marketed as a feature of the hardware they sell. Also Google Maps is just better.
Disclaimer: I haven't used it for about a year, I simply don't drive enough at the moment - I doubt it has declined in quality.
TomTom is an extremely good paid ($6/mo) nav app - if you appreciate not being a product. It seems to now be named "TomTom Go Expert: Truck GPS" but does still have car mode. You _have_ to download maps, it's fundamentally offline. Routing is fantastic. They've been around since car nav was devices that you purchased.
The only area where it falls behind is finding businesses, but Google and Apple will probably always be rulers there.
I just installed Google maps after 4 years and man it is shitty with cosntant recommendations and nags too. I just want a map and search and directions. But Apple maps is sooooo shitty at those...
I find Apple is better at turn-by-turn navigation, while Google is better at business and POI data. I will usually look stuff up on Google Maps, but use Apple Maps in the car for navigation. Google's navigation is (last I used it) bad at telling me what's next. I'll turn, it will say nothing, then wait until I'm right on top of something to tell me to do it... I find it stressful.
I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.
CoMaps works really well as a wrapper of OpenStreetMaps. It even has seemingly-accurate hours for a few businesses near me! And if you are willing to dig into accessibility settings on the iPhone you can choose a good quality voice for navigation.
But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that
I never noticed that with google myself. I will say between apple maps and google maps that google maps is far more accurate for traffic estimates. You may be tempted to go with apple maps sitting them side by side when apple says its 6 mins faster than google. That is not apple maps finding some magic route. That is apple maps being dumb.
It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation requires more growth, and they're out of good ideas.
Look at any recent Apple revenue breakdown. If you pretend that the iPhone doesn't exist, Apple's most profitable market segment is services. Even the iPad and Mac can't dethrone it.
According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.
Yeah, royalty payments average ~60-70% for services where we can cleanly see the breakdown, and much higher for certain artists that can command it. Assuming the overhead for Apple and Spotify is 10% (big assumption), the margins are 20%, which is small for most SaaS. However, I assume both mostly use it as a loss (well, less-profit) leader as part of wider bundles.
My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
>My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience.
Same with my GrapheneOS phone. FOSS is a jewel to be treasured!
As for ads permeating our spaces, I think it's high time to implement strict ad control; the only place you should see ads is in the Yellow Pages, as listings. No more billboards, backs of receipts, outsides of shopping bags, not in newspapers (except classifieds) or magazines, not on websites, not on entertainment feeds, or anywhere else besides going to a directory and searching for a specific class of service or product. Also directories (stores included) must permit ordering by distance (strict, no algorithm foolery), cost, review count, average reviews, number of sales, and other criteria based on the data they collect; it should be as simple and reliable as sorting in LibreOffice Calc, with zero sponsored manipulation to advantage sponsors in the listings.
You'll go out of business without such Tom-foolery? Great! Your business isn't viable and is frankly a joke; go provide some real value instead you leech!
I think I agree with the idea that it is better to turn the smartphone into the phone you want, but I think it might require a bit more work than just not installing TikTok :)
Because the iPhone has some ads for Apple services baked in, which is what the article is about. But it's really minor. The people complaining about this don't actually have iPhones, haha.
You might want to check out the Bigme HiBreak phones, they're basically low-mid Android phones with e-ink screens. They work perfectly well for the dull functional things expected of a phone, while rendering all the addictive and spammy patterns pretty ineffective. I've found my one very useful as an intermediate step between a dumbphone and a traditional smartphone.
I tried out dumb.co. Their flip phone supports maps, MFA, Uber, imessage/call forwarding.
I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.
A year or two ago my iPhone started showing ads for Kentucky Friend Chicken on the home screen. I've never been to this store, installed anything related to it, or even visited their website.
Apparently this is triggered by walking near a venue of theirs. Apple doesn't classify this as an app, it's a "suggestion". The huge sign at the mall that says "drink coca cola" is also a suggestion, that doesn't make it any less of an ad.
The App Store has had third party ad for years too. And the settings app has first party ads too. iOS is full of ads, it's the exact crap that users expected to avoid with Apple.
> A year or two ago my iPhone started showing ads for Kentucky Friend Chicken on the home screen.
Please, elaborate. Because this sounds like a very thin slice of the whole story. Where in the Home Screen? How did it show up? Notification? Live activity? Automatically installed app? SMS?
iOS, regrettably, features ads in some places, but I have never seen (or heard about) any of it showing up on the Home Screen by itself and I cannot even fathom HOW that would play out since the only for information to show up in the Home Screen is through widgets, and those have to be put there, or they are shown “intelligently” (notice the quotes there) on smart stacks IF you have the “suggest widgets” thingie enabled—but then again this would mean you have the KFC app installed on your phone and you use it rather frequently so I don’t think it would classify as an ad in any valid way.
Yeah, but app clips don’t show up out of the blue unannounced and Siri suggestions show up on Siri widgets or the spotlight/siri AI, which have to be purposefully invoked/put there.
I am a small developer on iOS and the App Store Search ads are super frustrating. When users search for my exact app name, apple shoves 2 full screen ads on top of the search results. Sometimes, it's 1 search results sandwiched in between 2 ads which makes the user miss it because they scrolled past the ads.
Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.
I've always found it crazy that if you search for a brand name / trademarked name that it's legal for the search provider to shove a bunch of vaguely related shit above the results unless that brand pays for ad placement to be the top result. Sure, fine, put whatever ad pays the most at the top of the search for "best iOS game" - but when someone searches "Wordle" - that you can't rely on Wordle being the top result is a indictment of the whole ad-supported internet. (Sub 'Claude' or 'Discord' or whatever other search term and it's the same issue)
It's worse than that. App names must be unique, but if you search for the exact (unique!) name, the exact hit isn't even rated on top! I have the app "Bit" on the app store and you have to do quite a bit of scrolling, even if you don't count the ads.
Same problem here too. I have a game called "Unscramble!" and it's impossible to find it with that name. I have scrolled for many pages and can't find it. Meanwhile, many very old apps which haven't been updated in many years are showing in the results.
when i am looking for a specific app on the App Store, I never use the app store to search. I search the web and look for a link to it on the app store. Mostly it's faster that way.
That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.
It's lousy that you can't turn off the badge notifications for the Settings app, which is where they push this garbage. I'm still on iOS 18, and I just have to live with a red '1' on my Settings app because I haven't updated my OS. It also pokes me every week or two to update.
It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.
And the b0rked that with the new Siri - I had to turn Siri off today because I literally couldn't get to an app unless I knew its location on the Home Screen.
It's not just iOS. Final Cut Pro on MacOS now regularly advertises iPadOS Final Cut Pro (which is a paid SaaS tool). Professional applications (arguments about Final Cut Pro X not being all that professional notwithstanding) that advertise like that are almost non-existent in the pro audio and video industry; an Apple pro app advertising, would have been heresy a few years ago.
And yeah, it drives me crazy. It's one more, wildly unnecessary, click.
Logic is one of the last tools keeping me tethered to MacOS. I've got 26 years invested in it, but the moment I open it up to record something and see an ad, it's over. Ardour and Bitwig will suffice, even if it means flushing tens of thousands of dollars of software down the toilet with it (the core suite of plugins I use).
I'm tired of unnecessary speed bumps in the creative process. It's why I no longer use a Roli Seaboard (what wildly awful software).
Apple continues down a course (addicted to ads, even their own) that I've seen few recover from.
The title had me thinking they had actual adverts open to advertisers. It's not, just someone winging about apple advertising icloud+ and some other stuff in their settings app where you can directly enable it. Come on you lot, this is fine, it's like the least ad driven mainstream commercial platform.
The least crap of the crap is not a laudable position. I’m a big Apple fan but they need to stop this shit with advertising. The amount of advertising built in to a $1,000+ device, including ads for the device maker’s own services, should be exactly zero.
Funny to read claims like that on techradar, that showed multiple pop-up frames around the 'article' and on top of it. But they haven't added an image of that 'ads'. No you have to read and try to understand what happened.
I thought the exact same thing. Of course, a key difference is that those of us who choose to pay for an iPhone, use iOS, and often pay for additional services are already giving Apple our money. They're trying to extract more and more from us and it's honestly insulting. I give techradar credit for providing us their user-hostile experience for free.
I swapped supermarkets the other day because Tesco’s search now has several sponsors at the top of every search - and they’re weird keyword matching that doesn’t even work so you get nonsense products.
Search for ‘mint’ and you get 2 rows of toothpaste. Who searches for toothpaste by typing ‘mint’? Of course it’s bloody mint flavour. I want some actual mint.
iOS has essentially been nagware for a long time now. I switched to android because everything iOS does is to continually put focus on iOS. So many nagging prompts, so much broken/misleading configuration. iOS is now the hellstew du jour. Android is with the exception of Gemini, a peaceful computing platform.
Also developing for iOS which I did for a long time will turn you off iOS when you see how slow the apps are and how unreliable the OS really is.
Personally, I think iOS is a rolling disaster and its influence on MacOS made macs no longer worth it. If Ternus wants to do something. Scrap iOS.
This is not new, I remember seeing those for the whole year (till potential Apple care promotion expires) when you buy a new phone years ago, and yes, they stay for weeks or longer.
for the first time in many years it’s these ads that have me looking at Android devices seriously. it’s the fact that they can’t be easily dismissed that bothers me the most (although clearly annoying even if they were quick to dismiss)
Nah - Music, TV, Fitness etc all included. All shared with the family (and extended family) so it doesn't have the friction of piecemealing it all together, which I value more than anything.
I've tried clicking them away and they keep coming back. E.g. my current watch is about to hit a year old and doesn't have Apple Care. I clicked away anything about the Apple Card in Wallet and I just had it sitting right at the top when I was trying to get to my boarding pass last week. I have no idea why it keeps telling me about Apple Fitness or Apple Music each time I purchase a new device, I was aware of it the last 6 times it tried to push those.
I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.
From the article, many users report being unable to disable them:
> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."
> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.
There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."
Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.
People are being intentionally obtuse in order to find something to get mad about.
Obviously offering add-ons to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.
Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.
If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.
best bet is currently GrapheneOS and that is still Adroid and will likely have to fight an up-hill battle in coming years
there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible
but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.
The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.
Decent companies listen: I suggest contacting support; if enough people do it they might realize the errors in their ways.
I had a similar experience with promotional notifications from Hyundai: I suspect I'm not the only person who called their support saying, "I don't want ads from a $70,000 car."
Today, I emailed Craig Federighi about the ads in App Store search results as well as Apple Intelligence models eating up 30 GB on my Mac mini despite it being turned off.
I use NextDNS on my iPhone and I don’t think I’ve ever seen these ads in years of usage. I lay my coups dollars a month for iCloud family storage but that’s it.
This is clickbait. The way they put "ads" in quotes every time shows they know what they're doing. I've seen some other comments here complaining about ads in Maps (which I've never used and can't speak to), but this article is specifically calling out the long-existing practice of Settings showing a little badge on new devices that says "You're entitled to some free months of Arcade/TV" or whatever. That's not an ad, or an "ad."
It's definitely an ad, but it's also been there for years now. And of all the ads I encountered across various platforms and spaces in real life, these are about the least obnoxious.
That's the thing, though. Those modal offer popups have been in macOS and iOS for a really long time, and does cheapen the experience like Microsoft and Google products do.
I've suffered the iCloud ads for almost 2 years at this point. You can't dismiss it, or if I can... the badge only disappears for a day and then it's back. I wish I could turn off iCloud completely, I have no use for it and do not want it. It sometimes hijacks files that I wanted to keep local-only.
In a few years, Apple will be indistinguishable from Microsoft when it comes to dark patterns, and all the mystique/enchantment will have faded away completely. That's just the works of the """free market""".
It's not a """free market""" when a company is able to use a government-granted and -enforced monopoly to keep people locked into the company's proprietary app store.
There absolutely is a market for a new 'premium' smartphone maker to arrive.. But given the hardware prices currently, we are stuck with two companies who are purely now squeezing every cent they can out of us while destroying their experience.
I named five companies that if you search for "$COMPANY_NAME flagship" you will quickly find relevant models.
Now if you are looking for luxury phones, that's a different thing. Something from Vertu would likely qualify. They are expensive and are made from high end materials, but the phones themselves aren't that special.
> Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
When you have willingly agreed to live your cyber life exclusively in the inside a golden jail, don't complain when the COs decide to collectively abuse you.
Yeah, I kept getting a notification about purchasing and extended warranty for my AirPods, which was annoying because it shows up in the same place as OS updates.
I find it ironic that I am attempting to read an article that says what it says while 80% of the screen is ads and asking me to register to their notifications.
GrapheneOS + Neo Store + FFUpdater + Aurora Store do not eyerape you with ads. Just some food for thought and consideration.
OSMAnd~ for maps, SimpleX + Orbot (and VPN for calls) for secure telecommunication, JRPN 15C & 16C for calculator, Collabora Office for spreadsheets, BravePipe (or NewPipe) for YouTube client, Silence for automatic call rejection (reject all callers not in your contacts for example, and regex/rules-based), ... need I go on?
This is exactly the moment Elon has been expecting to launch his always connected phone, offer superb quality, with unique features at a price even higher than Apple and I know for sure it will make inroads in their market share. Give devs all the tools and the ecosystem will surpass both iOS and Android, just like Huawei is doing in China
Options is all we need, and tools to customize them. And just like Blackberry or Nokia, they will learn the hard way
Meh. Apple ads in settings is a nothing burger. Ads anywhere else is degenerate and another matter.
But I don’t get to finish the article for all the ads on the website. 1/3 of my phone was filled with a banner at the bottom. 1/8 video player, and then a sign-up screen covered all.
Enshitification world order will lead me to use the phone less. So there!
Yes and they are the most unobtrusive “ads” you could possibly imagine. This thread is weird. There’s even a guy in here shilling for an unreleased “Elon Phone”.
Long time Apple user of over 2 decades, 10s of thousands spent.
Between always-listening Apple Watch, the upcoming cameras of Airpods Pro, Siri AI forced on us for functionality that doesn't require it, ads, them not giving a damn for obvious easy fixable issues like App Store search, and other shit like not adding step counter complication to older Watch models, I'm seriously considering not moving to Android/Windows, but giving up parts of the "smart" ecosystem altogether. Fucking expanding of ads are the last nail on the coffin. Even the few they snuck in were more than enough, the correct number of ads in an OS or app that's not a browser should be zero.
Started going to smaller brand earpods (maybe will even go back to wired except for gym), started to leave my Apple Watch at home also except for gym, and even for that will just go get a fitness band, and not buy any new Apple Watch models, and am seriously considering one of the "minimal" phones or even a dumb phone.
Apple promotes other Apple products in Apple products. End of the world. This yellow press is annoying. "Journalism". All this outrage to fullfill daily quota of text output.
And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.
Ads and tracking don’t have to be related. Physical ads in magazines and newspapers are still ads, but don’t report on who you are. Similarly, if you have a service connected to an account on your OS, it knows which tier you are on and can try to upsell you.
I’m not defending ads or Apple here, far from it as I hate what they’re doing. I’m just saying that while we’re used to privacy invading ads, not all ads have to be so.
I mean sure but reality is pesky. Most ads buys are targeted. Once a company has accepted putting ads in, difficult to know when they've started allowing information gathering. Technically it is already the case that companies sell targeting information before they accept ads even.
> Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered.
FWIW, it's quite easy to get rid of them. Repeat three times: tap it, then decline the offer. After three times, it doesn't come back.
Also, they usually seem to be for "free" things, like 3 months of free Apple Music included with your hardware purchase. Or reminders to set up Siri or Wallet when you first set up a new phone. Or to install an eSIM.
Techradar complaining about Ads while it's showing three different full-screen popups while trying to just read the first paragraph of the article is certainly a choice
Was watching Ted Lasso, and Three Little Birds by Bob Marley came along. As I paused the show for something unrelated an advertisement showed up for buying Three Little Birds on Apple Music. Nope. Big fat nope. I already paid you. Go away, you w*nkers.
I went to Apple to de-Google, 5 years in and I just went to GrapheneOS to de-Apple (and re-Google just a bit too much for comfort but ok).
The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".
Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).
I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)
Thank goodness... I thought I was the only one complaining. Ever since Apple started putting ads in the App store, I started referring to them as an "ad company". Every time I search for, say, "Signal" and see the first result be a "promoted" link to "Whatsapp", my blood boils.
F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.
I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!
All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"
Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.
I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.
In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.
The one I have is also lying to me, it says: "Activate iCloud Storage - An iCloud storage upgrade is ready to be used with your Apple Account "account@icloud.com". Continue"
I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.
I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.
Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.
I like to buy music. I usually buy from iTunes but I hate that they keep pestering me for rent for their subscription service.
The latest think I've noticed is that iTunes now advertises at one price but actually bills me at a higher price (79p in iTunes, £1 on my credit card).
If Apple behaves like every other manufacturer it will stop being worth the premium.
Comparing the Settings banner to the Start menu banner as seems a bit overblown. One you only see when you open settings, which is typically not daily or even necessarily weekly for most people; the other you see potentially up to hundreds of times a day, every day you that use your device. This article would have been a lot more meaningful if it had focused on the Maps app’s ads and the News app’s ads (by Taboola!), which do actively interfere with the quality of experience delivered and are enshittifying services provided, or the Game Center “try this other app” ads that float over other apps and can’t be disabled, in order to make the point that the badge ads were in fact the earliest harbinger of the slippery slope we always fear everything to be. Lacking any actual investment of effort along those lines, it reads more as wahmbulance chasing than meaningful news.
But Apple must enshittify all Apple products because it increases shareholder value. Else an activist shareholder will arise and accuse Ternus of dereliction of duty.
True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.
Apple has loads of hostile behaviors like this. For example, tracking users for their own marketing, but showing unsettling dialogs about "allow third party tracking" instead of "customization".
They're a hyper competitive (and often anti-competitive) company , and kudos to them, but it's odd that the community hardly criticizes apple to the degree MS , Facebook or Amazon for the same practices
I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...
Worth remembering that Steve Jobs championed "iAds"... https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/13/steve-jobs...
Yeah & they veered so hard into tying to make them tasteful & not suck that it failed. Turns out the real money is in spyware.
How so? This smells like Apple Distortion Field. "Yeah our ads are better. Its the other guys' ads that are bad".
The problem with Apple is they make statements that they walk back gleefully at a moments notice.
- Nobody wants a bigger phone - iPhone Pro Maxes
- Nobody wants foldables - iPhone Duo
- We've simplified the product portfolio .. ahem.
- AI is bad - Ours is called Apple Intelligence. Totally different thing.
Think Different indeed.
When iAd launched, it was a $1 million minimum spend just to get onto the platform, they wanted large corporate “lifestyle” brands, Apple exerted creative control over how ads were designed so they could enforce a bunch of user experience guardrails & marketers had no means of independently verifying campaign performance themselves. Their only source was whatever Apple told them. It did not do well. A few years later they tried to salvage it by dropping the minimum spend to $50, removing themselves from the process & making it closer to Google’s AdMob—or approximately as much as Apple was able to early last decade—but it was too little too late. They dropped it by 2016.
When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.
Well, and dozens of other innovations every other company copied, conveniently ignored.
From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI, to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on, to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta, to the first modern touch smartphone, 1 full year before Android came out (and which made Android change its beta design to copy the way iOS worked), to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right, to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip. Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
Modern "services+ads" Apple sucks to the point that I'm moving away, but to say they didn't innovate is laughable.
I don't want to really downplay Apple but there's much better innovation examples that what you listed. One of Apple's great advantages is that it owns the hardware, unlike Linux or Windows. Those have to work in highly heterogeneous environments. I mean Linux runs on everything from a literal potato to a super computer and everything in between.
To highlight Apple's innovation maybe mention things like the iPhone or iPod. They weren't the first devices of their kind but Apple's magic was always the mixture of the two Steves. Technical but stylish. But modern Apple isn't the same. The magic is gone
A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with...
> From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI
Ignored because nobody cares or wanted it.
> to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on
Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
> to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta
That's a remarkable engineering achievement but that's an implementation detail. Backwards compatibility on the desktop was and still is tablesakes.
> to the first modern touch smartphone
Nobody forgot, there's always one of you to remind the class that Apple was first (by your own definition of modern touch smartphone)
> to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right
They were clearly the first to demonstrate that people did indeed want fully wireless despite HN's objections at the time.
> to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip
That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
> Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
I don't know anyone who claims otherwise, and for the longest time they didn't make their own touchpads. So much for being conveniently forgotten.
>A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with... / Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
That explains why someone younger might not see the innovation. But that's on them, the innovation doesn't get erased as an innovation because people take it for granted. If the question is "did Apple innovate", then it includes all those cases, whether some moody Gen A cares for them or not.
Besides, that's not an argument. Apple still has many recent innovations. And we're talking as techies, devs, and products people here, and of various ages. Not just as "people who only ever known Spotify" and never bothered to learn the history of their field. Those wont know what Rosetta or a 5G chip is either anyway.
>That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
A, yes, all those classic Google, Facebook, and MS designed CPUs, that put a fire under Intel/AMD and set the benchmark for future laptop CPUs. You're being disingenuous.
What a bad-faith comment. You just wanted to launch into an anti-Apple lecture and it doesn’t sound like you have the slightest clue about this specific topic. Have you watched the iAds presentation? They’re not like any other advertisements I’ve seen before. CERTAINLY not at the time. You can see exactly why advertisers didn’t bite.
Honest question. If iAds were so good, why didnt it succeed?
When something is successful its all Apple. When something fails, its just that others dont get it.
Do you afford the same benefit to other people/companies? Why is Apple so special?
Because they were good for the customer rather than the advertiser, and the money to Apple came from the advertiser in this case.
Ads in Apple Maps. How is it user friendly?
It's probably the single one time where I would actually want ads.
For example roaming the city at 4am on a Saturday and trying to find some place with hot food. Google failed miserably at this. Eventually I found something but just because I knew it was often open at night. It was also marked open on Google Maps but never came up in searches there. Probably other places paid Google more for a listing despite being closed at that time.
Not sure how Apple does with this as I don't have any Apple anymore except a work iPad. It's too limited for me in terms of what I can install. But there's certainly some room for improvement in mapping.
Hah, that Google experience clicking though closed closed closed... Okay fine, i will accept my stupidity for even considering this approach. Wont happen again.
There's an "open only" button?
Oh I didn't find it, I have to say I don't use google maps very much. I normally use OSMAnd only. But most businesses don't bother updating their opening hours on openstreetmap.
Not iAd. Different ads
Ad revenue is bad revenue if you're going for the high end of the market. If it has ads, it's crap.
Apple has all but conquered the high end of the market, but that ad revenue... it's so tempting... soooo tempting... just one hit...
What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies
> Switch to android which has even more ads?
Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).
iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.
Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.
What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.
> Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier
Or just none? I'm not doing anything special and the only ads I ever see are from some games.
I get texts from my carrier that are treated specially and I didn't buy my phone through them
Same here. I do not see any ad's, not counting occasional push notification from apps which are there mostly due to my laziness.
> What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
> There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.
Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.
> Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs.
Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.
There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.
> Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new.
"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.
That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.
"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”
Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
> "Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
> That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing. "If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).
> If I create a messaging app…
Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.
I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.
> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.
> The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?
> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.
We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?
Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.
If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?
> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.
Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.
> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.
We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.
> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS
Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
> You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.
You might if there were only two restaurants and both were really meaty.
Yes, there are more than 2 phone OS options but nearly the whole of the market is those 2.
Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share. People act like Apple was just miraculously granted market share over Blackberry and that they didn’t create a competitive product to earn that spot.
Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.
> Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share.
"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."
Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.
They do. People won't buy good products if they have green bubbles. Guess who controls the bubble color.
Capitalism is the art of making your customers act like this.
This isn’t permanent. We see the rise and fall of plenty of brands overtime (Nike, Mitsubishi, etc).
If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.
> I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.
Have a look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?
The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.
Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.
I really dislike the sheeple argument.
I thought about this in a different context many years back. A friend lent me a GP2X, a Linux based handheld game console. I already had a Nintendo DS, with one of those homebrew cartridges (which I used for the officially advertised purposes, rather than the wink-wink-nudge-nudge purposes). That got me to thinking whether locked down platforms were okay, that they may actually provide opportunities for developers of open systems.
The problem is that history has proven time and time again that it doesn't. While the homebrew scene for the DS was vibrant, even with the barriers, it was lacklustre on the GP2X, even without the barriers. There were likely a lot of reasons for that, but they all pretty much add up to the idea that not buying locked down products will not help.
> on their products
It's no longer theirs once they sell it.
I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.
Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.
Personally I did none of that on my android (except set up firefox with ublock), and I get very few ads and they're easily stopped.
> The average person has no idea what lineageOS is
The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.
And they will quickly return it when they realize their banking app doesn’t work and they can’t stream that sports package they subscribed to.
Why don't they work? Google lock-in.
Actually they don't work because those apps suck. Typically the banks are responsible for preventing their own apps from working there. Because they don't care or because they follow some bullshit security-theatre policies, or because they just don't understand security, I don't know.
It's not Google that adds the code that makes your banking app fail: it's the goddamn bank itself.
But I agree with your point that the reason it sucks is not the AOSP-based system, and it's sad to blame the system when it's the app (or many times just Google) that is to blame.
And AT&T shouldn't allow you to connect other phones, or modems at all. You should only be able to get a phone by renting it monthly from AT&T - everything else should be illegal.
lol. what an android user comment. “Simply install LineageOS! All you have to do is extract this tarball…”
A solution that’s just for computer nerds is close to no solution at all. It’s certainly not one I care to talk about. I may do it myself, but I don’t for a second consider it in any legitimate discussion about how any non-negligible portion of the market behaves.
What ads does android have? I see ads when I'm inside specific apps, youtube, chrome, etc, but not when I'm using apps that don't have ads?
When I first switched to Android, I was shocked to see Google's Photos app send me an ad for buying printed printed framed photos. After turning that off, I haven't noticed many ads.
Huh, I wonder if there's some I've just grown so used to they're a blindspot. I don't use google photos though...
Google Photos is always trying to upsell storage beyond 15GB: "(you're going to lose your pictures), turn on backup?". Even pressing the "Search" button got me that prompt once, with some blah blah that AI-assisted search only works when the photos are on the cloud...
The Play Store landing page is packed full of them - mostly scams.
I am either blind to ads or i see no ads in android (samsung). of course many apps have ads, at least not in the actual OS.
They also try to sell Samsung Care+ through the settings app.
I don't disagree with your main point, but the H is important context here
BTW, in iPhone I tend to get lots of ads because Safari doesn't have ad block, I can't repackage APKs, can't edit DNS, not to mention all the spam calls/texts (especially from icloud emails...). Thank God the ublock folks got an iPhone app. I mean it isn't a fair comparison, a rooted Android vs stock iPhone, but it's trivial to root a pixel and on an iPhone I can't even access my photos from a terminal emulator... so there's no fair comparison that can be made
At least Android allows truly alternative web browsers with ad blockers that aren't handicapped by Manifestv3 limitations.
I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it
It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.
Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.
Android by itself does not have any ads.
I have had until now 4 Android smartphones, which did not have any ads whatsoever.
Like other posters have said, if you do not buy the phone directly, but subsidized by some carrier, then it might come with crap installed on it.
Of course, currently Google appears to make efforts to make Android worse, so it would not be surprising if ads would appear.
Which Android though? AOSP doesn't have ads. But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services (McAfee VPN, McAfee security scan, OneDrive, etc.). I heard that Chinese phones are similar. Even Pixel pushes Google One in places.
The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).
I have used several models of Sony Compact phones, until Sony discontinued that line of products, then ASUS phones.
No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.
The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.
> I heard that Chinese phones are similar.
My Xiaomi has no adverts.
But then the Samsung S22 I had before didn't have adverts. Certainly didn't come with McAfee.
> But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services
I have a Samsung and I've never seen such ads.
The kind of ads they are talking there in the article would be in cheap Chinese phones in the Android world I think.
Moto phones are relatively ad free. There's a few (removable/disableable) apps on it at stock that have ads, the rest is all good.
I've been very happy with the low-end moto phones I've bought, and plan to continue with them until they inevitably get worse.
I've heard their flagships will start coming with GrapheneOS next year. Should be a step in the right direction.
I do not see a lot of ads on Android but i think that might be my particular (light and limited) usage.
You are right though. A duopoly is rarely a competitive market, especially for complex products (it can be for commodities)
> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage
Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.
I'm on S24, and the way my device has been setup, there are no ads
My stock Pixel phone has zero ads. It prompts you to enable things like Wallet and all the AI stuff, but I just turned that off, and it's not bothering me anymore. There are no persitent ads.
I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).
Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)
Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.
It's worse than that. Google Photos sends push notifications telling you to buy photo books and prints unless you opt out. Play Books also sends push notifications telling you to buy particular books; it's also opt out. I'm semi-certain other built-in apps like YouTube and the Play Store do the same. However, once you turn all that junk off, the Pixel experience is pretty good.
Why would you even enable notifications on these apps?
I'm on GrapheneOS, so they are not enabled by default, but I think on Google certified Android you can also switch them off. Also, besides that, if apps implement notifications nicely, they are nicer on Android, because you can turn on/off notifications per category/channel. Of course, some apps just put everything together.
I guess you can disable or uninstall Photos but I don't know anything better so I'm currently ignoring the nags.
I was horrified about how many ads my wufe has on her iPhone. I mean web ads in Safari. It's unsusable.
> I mean web ads in Safari.
That’s just the internet isn’t it?
Not sure we can blame Apple for that, but I’m sure they could cook up a decent blocker if they wanted.
Apple also forces users onto a web browser that effectively has the same limitations as recent versions of chrome with respect to ad blocking.
They could easily resolve that by allowing alternate browsers, but choose not to.
Install Wipr on her phone. Problem solved.
About Photos: why not disable notifications for the Google Photos app?
They're disabled, I get the nags in the app.
> Switch to android which has even more ads?
I never see ads on my android phone
> Switch to android which has even more ads?
I am on Android, I have no ads.
> Switch to android which has even more ads?
I use Android
No ads.
I feel left out, thank Dog for that!
What we need is to change the rules so any company that sells ads gets taxed on revenue in addition to profit. Not just ad revenue, all revenue.
Throwing it out there, YouTube is top-of-their-class and ran mostly from ads
YouTube's market is still shit though. High end of that market is those billionaires who pay for actual cinemas in their mansions.
[dead]
> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.
Does anyone use the App Store other than to search for an already known app name? I probably have not in over a decade, and I can't see a reason I ever would.
Best part of searching the App Store for something you know is that even though the hamming distance between the search term and the thing you want is 0, the thing you want will not be at the top of results anyway.
This causes me so many issues. Rolling out multi-factor authentication and having some no-name random app show up as the first result for "microsoft authenticator" is downright malicious behavior on the part of the app store.
I used to. In the "golden days" of "there's an app for that", I would peruse the App Store looking for new games. I spend hundreds of dollars on games doing that. Now, the only games you see really are shovelware or subscription garbage.
Who _is_ using the App Store these days? It's such a mess.
Ive often wondered if there is some magic internally Appleid setting which turns an account into an ad free one for internal execs.
If you could buy into an account like this, with the cost being just over the ad profit from my account, I’d be interested.
This would only move the needle further in the direction of a terrible user experience. This is exactly what we don't want.
“iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users—a highly desirable demographic for advertisers—and provide developers a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low cost applications.”
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/06/07Apple-to-Debut-iAds...
> I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option)
I had no idea this was possible and was looking for the list of apps with updates available. This is why I always go to the comments first!
Don’t mix apples with oranges Steve was The Apple those guys are CE—replaceable-O-ranges. If board and shareholders want ads there is no one to tell them get lost anymore.
> Steve was The Apple iAds conveniently forgotten
The service was not as successful as expected, partly due to high pricing and Apple's strict control over data.
No wonder ad platforms that stay afloat till this day can have up to 30% of income from scam ads.
Search on the app store sucks too. I haven't been able to find either a way to search for only apps that charge for downloads (I don't want to watch an ad for features, or nickel and dimed on IAP), or some kind of "minimum price" slider I can use.
That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.
Use AppRaven, its better for discovery and actual discussion of app stuf
You should specify appraven.net, as a scammer just slopped together an AI site based on your (or others) recommendation, charging $50 a month.
"Apps worth copying, already making money." – https://web.archive.org/web/20260923001345/https://appraven....
"Stop guessing. AppRaven(.app) shows you what people really search for on the App Store, what they complain about in the apps that already exist, and hands you a plan you can start coding today."
Thats wild, wow. Thanks for clarifying that
> I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.
why do you say a hardware VP would be driving adware? totally different part of the apple world, at least when i was there for years.
Sorry. For some reason got him mixed up with Steve Lemay lol.
But still.
Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye or Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.
Even here.
Joh Termus was just picked up randomly out of a box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to checks notes lead all of Apple.
> is entirely new to Apple
where did that come from? he's been at Apple since 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ternus
Read the original comment: "I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.".
I mean. John Ternus and other execs and senior management had nothing to do anything with it. They were all new, picked up randomly out of the box and only obligingly did the bidding of Tim Cook (or Alan Dye, or both).
Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.
The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.
Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.
Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.
I've never understood this.
You can get shirts tailored (bespoke, not MTM!) for well under $100 in Istanbul, around $150 in Hongkong, and about $200 in Mexico City.
So why pay to be a walking advertisement for some European brand conglomerate?
> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt
Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.
Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?
If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?
It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.
Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.
Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.
I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).
> thermocline of trust
Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.
That applies to businesses with small moats.
Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.
Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…
it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.
> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
The real question is why is the median Apple decision maker circa 2026 vastly more short term greedy than the median Apple decision maker circa 2012?
I think some of it just that different people have different priorities. Some of what protected Apple was vanity. I think Steven Jobs cared about how people saw him and his products. He wanted to be the guy who made a premium product that he thought was cool and was proud of. The longer time went on, the less Apple execs cared about what he would have wanted and started caring more about what they wanted.
I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.
Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.
I think the Apple Effect was largely a result of personal narcissism.
Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.
The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.
Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.
The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.
The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.
What happened to Apple University, or whatever they called Job’s attempt to document their key to success?
Some MBA poisoned it?
Steven Jobs definitely cared about the polish as a reflection of himself. He wanted people to associate the name Steven Jobs with apple. When people thought of apple they thought of Steven Jobs. He didn't want to put the name of his company on anything unpolished or tasteless because people would associate that with Steven Jobs, since everyone knew Steven Jobs had the final say.
I think it's not just Apple. Everyone and every company seem to become greedier and greedier. Economically, the world is not in a great place, apart from a minority which just gets richer and richer.
While I don't know, my suspicion is that the market is saturated, but the company is still hungry for "numbers go up".
"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.
It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?
Everyone is slowly moving the line. Cant move to far ahead, cant stay to far behind.
The more we can isolate consumers the less they will care about others and the less of a point complaining.
No more Jobs being tastemaker at the helm. Cook is pure business.
I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
There exists a good answer to that question but they apparently dont know it.
apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
> lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
> they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
Yup. If the main differentiator is gone, you move to the next marginal thing that matters, which in this case is working as a map.
Yes it is for me. Google Maps has much better and more up to date information.
A number of times I’ve been set to the wrong place by Apple Maps.
If you’re going to be served ads either way you might as well pick the more reliable tool.
For maps Apple has a lower quality product, that lets me down when I really need it, and has no privacy advantage.
They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (for the Kindle it was $20 one-time).
For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.
Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?
I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.
I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.
> I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.
>I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension
That doesn't help you if you use the YouTube app on your phone, which I'm guessing is what a huge fraction of the viewership does.
But you can just use the browser with an adblocker for Youtube on the phone, which also allows you to play audio in the background for free e.g. for playing music, what's the point in using the app at all?
I'm speculating about what most mobile YouTube viewers actually do, not what makes the most sense.
> seat heater subscription services going for BMW?
Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.
> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
> t's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you.
Worth noting that this is what most of the live service gaming industry is doing.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
>which is even more bloated and ad infested.
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
Even better, Morphe can rip ads out of the native YouTube client :).
We need an open phone platform badly.
Where would the luxury market go? Asking for a friend
GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...
https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...
Pantone and some sound partnership.
From what I've seen of GrapheneOS, it's not a luxury product, it's a product for tinkerers, who don't mind finicky granular configs. If I'm paying a premium, I expect sensible, privacy respecting, defaults that I can use out of the box. Not constant fumbles until everything is "setup".
I think you have a wrong idea about GrapheneOS. You install the sandboxed Play Store/Services through their app store and then it's pretty much the same as any other Android phone. Except that it doesn't get in your face with preinstalled crap (Google, Apple, or Samsung). On the GrapheneOS forums there are a lot of non-technical people that install GrapheneOS and don't have many issues. The primary annoyance is Google's abuse of their monopoly with Play Integrity.
I would say it often feels more like a luxury product than an iPhone or Google-certified Android phone because it's not full of cheesy stuff. It's what iPhone and Pixel would look like if Apple/Google didn't want to push you: subscriptions, AI, movie/music apps, etc.
I don't think there's any defaults you need to change out of the box besides installing the apps you want.
But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.
As someone who has daily driven both side by side as much as I love GOS, AOSP / Android absolutely does not feel premium compared to iOS. Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS. And the FOSS apps on Android are extremely subpar in terms of feel compared to iOS (off the top of my head look at how bad the Fossify Contacts app is compared to Google Contacts) but that’s the trade-off.
I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS.
Sorry, but no.
I also have an iPhone for $REASONS. Both my prior iPhone Air and my new iPhone 18 Pro still frequently stutters. Even scrolling some settings screens (which are very simple), I can often see frames getting dropped. Apple apps like the App Store are one huge frame-dropfest (even if you let it preload all assets). Apple can't get a nearly 1500 Euro phone with the fastest single-core performance and probably the fastest GPU to render normal window chrome smoothly anymore.
My P10P with GrapheneOS, which only has a midrange SoC by modern standards (don't believe what Google tells you) and it is buttery smooth.
iOS got even more terrible with Liquid Glass, so many things are badly readable, even with the slider set to completely opaque in iOS 27.
iOS used to be premium compared to Android. But Apple enshittified iOS over the last few years. Even most Apple pundits agree.
Since people seem to disagree because they simply cannot see it, here are two recordings at 0.5x speed so that even people who are not sensitive to stutters can see it:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/S24N1S17XG#56iNGffWKqZr
https://drive.proton.me/urls/DH527V6GRR#625BpPuAcYPb
> I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
"There's a high chance." https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117299954135808210
In other posts they've said they will be sold with GrapheneOS out of the box.
Oh damn nice. Guess we’ll also see later today too since the Signature should be revealed at the snapdragon summit
We did not see. Unfortunately.
iOS? "Polish"?
Even AOSP is head-and-shoulders better than iOS.
It is subjective, to me AOSP just feels extremely rough and undercooked in a lot of places
Try disabling animations in AOSP and see how it feels. You won't be able to go to the painfully slow iOS afterwards.
When I see "polish" they're usually referring to the opposite of things like this. They seem to like sluggish UI as long as it's "smooth" (not "fast") and has flashy animations.
Seriously - first thing I do in any Android device in developer options
You don't even need developer settings for that, there's an official option in the accessibility settings.
Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.
Likewise, no Android Auto
No android auto? What are you basing this on? I ask because I am responding from grapheneos while connected to android auto, and I am concerned I am in the wrong universe again.
I guess I shouldn't believe what I read. I and when certainly wouldn't buy phone that doesn't do Android auto... Glad to hear it works!
It does. You do have to install it (GrapheneOS provides a Play Store Sandbox to install google apps to) intentionally, it is not installed by default. Perhaps that tripped up the author of the misinformation you came across?
In any case, it is a fantastic OS with many of the annoyances of Android removed. (Scoped file permissions are fantastic, for example) If you are on the fence, I'd suggest giving it a shot. Replacing a phone OS might seem scary, but it is really pretty similar to use.
There is Android Auto. There's contactless payments in Europe through Curve, Paypal, and some specific banks. Some companies are working on bringing them to the US.
Funny enough, the only part of Apple Pay I use with any frequency is the browser/app integration part, basically as a much more convenient alternative to PayPal sometimes.
IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.
> Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment
Cash is much better for privacy. The government, banking system, and countless intermediaries should not know how I spend my money.
So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance.
I agree about cash, but we are talking about a luxury experience. In fact, GrapheneOS has talked about it [1].
> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance
I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.
[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371
"Moving from cash to credit cards, PayPal, etc. is an ongoing privacy disaster."
In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.
You mean like when I clicked this article? What an ad filled mess of a website.
At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.
Where would they go? Android? That's even more spammy and ad ridden. They sure aren't installing grapheneOS.
> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
> On the flip side
Pun intended?
Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!
Don't give 'em more ideas! :)
Is BMW still doing the $20/mo for heated seats or whatever? All these companies man… not everything needs to be recurring revenue ffs.
That one gets a worse rep than I think it deserves.
You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.
It's bad because you already paid for the hardware, any additional charge is just a money grab.
Soon enough they'll be asking you to pay for Storage Space Pro (lets you open the trunk) and Intelligent Manual Media Control (lets you slightly lower the volume of ads that automatically blast out of all the speakers when the car is on)
It is already built into the damn car. Everyone already paid for it.
A one time fee to use something you’ve already payed for?
They’ve really MBA’d the crap out of that brand and it serves them right now it’s going down the tube.
Really? You think a luxury brand charging a subscription for heated seats, a basic add on, is inline (haha rip inline 6).
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?
Jobs would truly lose his shit if he saw what Apple has become.
Source - worked at Apple ~2010.
I haven’t worked for Apple but you’re definitely correct. Just compare what Jobs said about using a stylus with how happy the company was to announce that you could use Apple Pencil with the iPhone duo. It is self-evident. It’s far from the company Jobs once ran.
You’re misunderstanding that quote. “If you saw a stylus they blew it!” referred to requiring a stylus to interact with the touch display. Having one optional, mainly for drawing, isn’t quite the same thing.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
Yes, and it makes sense to add the stylus/pencil after app developers had to learn how to deal with finger taps only. Apple did the same thing with the original Mac. There were no arrow keys on the first model, so that developers were forced to accommodate the mouse.
Literal pencil-pushers are ruining the product!
Steve Jobs also repeatedly dissed the idea of an iPod that played video as late as one year before they started selling the iPod Video. I wouldn't take any of his stated opinions as gospel.
I like being able to use Procreate or other image editing software on my iPad, and the only reason I’d consider a foldable in the first place is because I’d like to use it like I use my iPad. What’s so bad about having the option to use a stylus? Who cares what a dead tech oligarch once thought of styluses? Especially when the state of the technology wasn’t where it’s at now. If you could ask Jobs now, maybe he would have changed his mind.
That's not a given. Visionary people sometimes go mildly insane over time. Source: worked at VKontakte and Telegram and watched it slowly happen to Durov.
How did it affect Durov?
Questionable features like being able to delete anything in the conversation on both sides. Tacky UI choices like liquid glass on Android or the excessive use of Lottie animations every-damn-where. All while being completely deaf to feedback, both from within the team (any criticism makes you "toxic") and from the public. The way he treats his employees isn't exactly good either.
The first one is excellent though, I wish all messengers had it.
But you can no longer trust Telegram that things you had in your chat will still be there tomorrow. This feature feels like someone has hacked into your device and deleted files they didn't like.
"Your" chat consists of other people's messages too and they own those. You can also delete your messages on Discord or Slack – it's quite normal as a feature.
Firstly, I'm talking about PMs, not group chats. Group chats have different requirements because they have to be moderated.
Of course, I have nothing against being able to delete your own messages for both. A time limit within which you can do that is nice but I can live without one. But Telegram lets you delete every message in any PM conversation, including incoming ones, for both people. Or even the entire conversation, and make it disappear from the other person's list without a trace.
Jobs has long been vocal about protecting the user experience. Not 100% sure if it's true, but I heard Jobs was originally opposed to custom apps running on the iPhone (the App Store), because he 'didn't want to turn iPhone in Windows'.
Jobs was right. Apps are so shitty now I don't even bother. Everything has a subscription now and there's so much noise its hard to actually find signal on the appstore.
Of course he wasn't right. Apps instantly became a signature part of the iPhone experience and a huge success story for the platform.
Or the app is fine, but I don't want to bother downloading it for some random thing that should just be a website.
OK...but basically everyone uses custom apps because they are tremendously useful. You'd just ban all of them?
Imagine if he had stuck to his guns on native apps. iPhone would’ve either died or we’d all be living in a web apps paradise right now.
It wouldn't have died - most apps are still just a thin UI over a corresponding online service, and most of the data and services proprietary APIs provide ended up achievable in a browser too. It is really just the internet that makes apps and smartphones useful.
All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
Early on it was different with a lot more stuff actually running locally vs cloud service era. App store predated that for a little bit actually. There weren't microtransactions initially either. What you'd call a AAA game for that platform back then would actually be $9.99 one time payment.
Jobs wasn't always correct about things. There are a large number of examples where he wasn't.
Didn’t Jobs frequently lose his shit when he did work at Apple?
Indeed. That’s what resulted in Apple beingn different than competition. Too bad Apple engineers were reprimanded and publicly humiliated, sometimes with no fault. But Jobs had a vision that’s been long gone from Apple and it really shows. Sometimes I wonder if Jobs himself would be corrupted by Apple’s success but I’ll never know the answer to that…
Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).
In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.
" even a trillion dollar company, "
Exactly, not "even", these huge companies have to squeeze money out of everything. To keep their growth rates up, they have to make bigger and bigger swings.
It really is a shame what's happening to Apple, but I think Apple customers are waking up and are looking increasingly for exits.
Exits to where? I personally I dialed down my phone use to a minimum. I still use Iphone just because I see no better alternative for my sporadic use. I use few apps minimally and install almost nothing, i can't remember when I last visited the app store.
Well you took the exit to "using my phone less", which is good for you, bad for Apple (less service revenue, probably less frequent hardware sales from you)
I love the "Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past" description, for those of us that remember the Apple that almost went bankrupt.
There are enough examples until the NeXT reverse acquisition, bringing Jobs back, that prove it wasn't always like that.
I bet you there is a CEO and friends version that is absolutely add-free.
The problem is the shareholders getting value from add adds now, while reducing the value of apple shares in the long run, by allowing a new premium producer to emerge.
> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products.
I bet they don’t see any ads, because their accounts will have the highest tier (or even a special one above that) of everything.
That’s bad hardening. You are not supposed to use your root account for everyday work.
It's not a root account issue, it's that they have already bought all the services there are to buy. One would assume that once you buy a service, they would stop prompting you to buy it.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
No, hardening has nothing to do with it. They have a feature flag system deeply embedded in their software. And such systems can totally distribute different flags to different people. And that's how you could easily create VIP accounts with different behaviors than the rest of the world, like all ad festures turned off.
reminds of me of an instance where the opposite happened:
> internal email from Bill Gates complaining about the usability of some Windows features. It’s old — from 2003
https://www.techdirt.com/2008/06/25/you-thought-you-hated-wi...
I'm 99% sure the hardening part was a joke
Thank you, sir.
I am still not sure if the joke was bad or if everyone takes everything too seriously nowadays.
I guess it was simply too close to reality. That's why I didn't register that as humor. Text also doesn't carry tone of voice well, which makes confusion more likely
What are these plethora of eyesore ads because the one that they’re mentioning in this article is the only one I have come across.
The Steve Jobs' phrase itself is a very well-done ad.
Hmmm… I'll be happy when Eddy Cue steps down.
omg, thank you for this
> tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option
It is because of things like that that i'm using Android. I feel like one of those boomers having no clue about tech whenever i am handed an iphone: everything feels like a trick, a set of secret gestures and recipes that everybody has mastered but me.
Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.
Android is just as bad. But it has one huge advantage: you can install apps on it.
Can't say I agree - I honestly tried using an iPhone for a few weeks, and I still couldn't reliably get where I wanted, because there's a good chance some input on the way would suddenly result in a totally different effect.
It feels like 80% of the UI has non-obvious overloads. I must have either skipped the tutorial or been too blind to find it, because otherwise these things are anything but intuitive. I've never struggled as much with any Android device, even with exotic manufacturer UIs.
It's true of android too, you're just used to it. Even Graphene eliminated the back button, and makes you swipe left from the right side instead, and the app switcher and home buttons, and makes you swipe up-right from the bottom.
No, I genuinely have not encountered the same reliability issues on any Android devices, even on my very first one.
I'm not a big fan of such gestures (mostly due to discoverability), but the few times I've used an Android without the navbar the gestures still felt reliable, even if I had trouble remembering them.
I got a Pixel 10, installed GrapheneOS. Then Google Play (which is sandboxed). I have 99,9% of all apps and a barebones launcher and some barebones fossify apps. Its pretty good, ugly if you let it but not bad
Android apps also have the icon-tap-and-hold actions…
Wow, I read it as "John Temu", which seems to be what Apple is being turned into.
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
Glad I'm a Linux user and admin.
I knew we were cooked when Costco started upselling its cookies at the self-checkout food court.
I think it really speaks to the situation we've gotten ourselves into. Capitalism requires us to constantly grow but I think the problem is we're myopic and believe we need to grow faster and faster. With the high concentration of power these companies have the easiest lever to pull is by making a service worse and having users pay for a better experience. That's a very different strategy than offering new products and/or features.
I call this myopic because it really only works when there's little to no competition but using it too much causes more backlash and causes people to get pissed enough to become the competition (and not sell out). I think Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play here. People aren't aligned with the goals of the organization. To be honest, it's hard to think of any company where it's clear the leaders, let alone employees, are dedicated to the goals of the company[0].
It's really sad too, since all these big companies seem to just be a shell of what they used to be. They used to be inspiring and it was exciting to see all the change and innovation. But it just seems to be more and more disappointment lately. Small changes so people can push their small org's status. No one taking any risks to really push things forward. These companies cornered the markets, have trillion dollar evaluations, yet act like they're poor. That boy ain't right...
[0] don't give me that nonsense of "the goal is to make money". The comment is about myopia. If this is your first reaction, you're being myopic and missing my point. You're welcome to disagree, but don't strawman
Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.
I have a script to add an /etc/hosts entry for `127.0.0.1 gdmf.apple.com` and that seems to eliminate any nagging, just remove when it's time to update.
Nice. Someone made a site to notify for updates when you have that subdomain blocked.
https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update/issues/19#issu...
This was after Apple broke the trick to prevent Tahoe update nags.
You'll miss security updates following that site
Probably ad updates too tho
That's unlikely, those come with the regular version
Eh, whatever
So you are starting to fight with your computer, just like users of Windows.
And even if you have automatic updates turned off, Apple will still start downloading the 15 gigs for MacOS 27, just in case...
And disable certain features like Apple Pay if you don’t have auto-updates enabled.
Sounds like an unauthorized access of my computer - a fine of a dollar per byte, per person, should make Apple turn the hell around. 15 billion dollars times how many Apple users that have been wronged in this manner? Apple would be dead instantly.
I think you'll find that you agreed to it somewhere in their voluminous terms of service.
I looked it up and indeed, it's in section 1, paragraph C:
Your Device will periodically check with Apple for Apple Software Changes. If a change is available, the change may automatically download and install onto your Device and, if applicable, your peripheral devices. By using the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and install automatic Apple Software Changes onto your Device and your peripheral devices.
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS26_iPadOS26.pdf
Which is why your parent says this behaviour should be fined. Laws override "consent" between contracting parties.
He said it's "unauthorized access of his computer", even though he implicitly authorized it by clicking through the agreement (apparently without reading it).
If people actually read these clickthrough agreements and started sending devices back when they don't agree, it would encourage the industry to change.
No one "needs" an iPhone, they can support one of the open source phones with far less onerous terms.
You can still consider it unauthorized, if you do not consider the authorization to be valid in the first place. I can also get people to sign away their life on a contract, that's not going to mean anything, because signing away your life is not possible in the first place.
> If people actually read these clickthrough agreements
I would live in such a world too, but that is a fairy tale. In a lot of situations, you don't get to see the contract before you have signed it. I had the situation in a bank contract. The bank clerk tells me it's mandatory, to sign that waiver, I tell her it's not. She won't sign the main contract, until I signed that waiver. I tell her that's illegal. Doesn't matter. After I signed it, I get to read the waiver, it clearly states, that it is not mandatory, and whether it gets signed does not have any effect on the main contract, as is required by law (with citation).
Because of these things, the laws says some things can't be established and most other things must be established with informed consent. It's on the company to ensure that this is collected. No, a tick on "I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions" is not informed consent.
Honestly, we don't need any law changes actually, because most of these things the tech companies do is plain illegal in every step.
-----
On the first page of a web search: https://www.legal500.com/intelligence/germany/privacy/german...
The Regional Court of Berlin held in a judgment of 16 January 2018 (docket no. 16 O 341/15, German language version of the judgment available here) that Facebook's default privacy settings and parts of their terms and conditions were invalid. This judgment provides important guidance on consent and transparency.
Background
The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (Federation) sued Facebook and requested cease and desist regarding some of its default settings and terms and conditions.
The Federation argued that Facebook's default settings violated the requirement of explicit consent. For example, the default settings included a location service in Facebook's mobile app revealing the location of the person that the user is chatting to. In addition, boxes were pre-activated allowing search engines to link to the user's timeline.
The Federation also argued that various clauses in the terms and conditions of Facebook were invalid, including clauses that provide consent of the user (i) to transferring personal data to and processing personal data in the U.S. and (ii) using the name and profile picture of the user for commercial, sponsored or related content.
Judgment of the Regional Court of Berlin
First, the Regional Court of Berlin found that five default settings were invalid because the requirements of informed consent were not fulfilled. The court stated that informed consent requires that an organization must provide comprehensive information about the background and the scope of the consent in order for the consent to be based on an entirely free decision of the user. Default settings cannot be regarded as informed consent if the user is not explicitly and actively notified of the default settings in the registration procedure. Facebook did not sufficiently ensure that the user was aware of the default settings. The court noted that a "virtual privacy tour" that Facebook offered, but that was not mandatory, did not change this. Not every user would make use of this privacy tour and "realistically", most of the users would not further review the privacy settings.
Next, the court held that the consent declarations in the terms and conditions were not transparent and therefore the users were not able to give informed consent. With regard to the consent to the transfer of personal data to the United States, the court observed that the user was not informed about which categories of personal data were transferred, why they were transferred, how they are further used in the U.S. and which standards of data security are applied. Further, the court concluded that the consent language for using the name and profile picture for commercial, sponsored or related content was not transparent. The extent of the usage of the name and profile picture was not clear for the user and not further explained. The court noted that the example that was provided in the consent wording (i.e., use for a brand that the user likes) was not sufficient information about the scope of the consent.
IMO the notion that such one-sided agreements are not made under duress needs to die in a fire. I wish there were a viable grassroots political movement to remove the corporate boot from our neck; until that point, fuck these terms of servitude and every abuse they enable.
Often these clauses ARE deemed null and void, but you need to bring it to a court and who has time for that?
> Sounds like an unauthorized access of my computer
This is exactly what Stallman and the FSF have been saying forever, but nobody believed them, https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.en.html
You can turn off the nagging by joining the Beta updates (profile) for the older major iOS version.
This is not to excuse Apple, just a useful trick.
The nagging notifications are only a small part. Apple has far more effective ways of forcing updates on you. On iPhones, for instance, the Unicode tables ship with the OS version, so unless you update, you cannot render newly added emoji codepoints. Given how central emojis have become to pop culture - and how determined the Unicode Consortium seems to keep adding more of them - the whole situation almost looks like a conspiracy, if you squint. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In the App Store, Apple won't let you filter for apps compatible with your iOS version. So sooner or later, you have to manually try installing every search result just to see whether it errors out. There's no explanation for not adding such a trivial filter other than to annoy users on purpose. Without jailbreaking, you also can't install earlier (compatible) versions of a given app. And by the way, updating iOS eventually just turns into buying a new iPhone, once the latest iOS no longer supports your device at all.
But the worst part is how critical software components are bundled with the OS too. On iPhone, that means WebKit. So very soon your Internet browsing experience starts to rot, because the only way to get a version supporting the latest Web standards is to update the whole of iOS. Likewise, on Macs, your runtimes/frameworks are bundled as well, so you can't update them individually. Eventually, the only way to install even non-native apps is to update the whole macOS.
This is what you sign up for when you buy an Apple product. Apple has mastered the art of tempting you without letting you realize what's really going on until it's too late. Apple was, is, and always will be evil. The clue is in their logo.
> Apple has far more effective ways of forcing updates on you
Let's not forget forcing physical upgrades: a new .x update of iOS that suddenly decides a bit of hardware is now broken and bricks the phone. Apple Store said £400 plus to fix despite my explaining it was their update that bricked it - every component was working fine
That was my 2nd and last ever iPhone.
I have automatically download and install (separate toggles) disabled, and it obeys that. Might be notifying me, I don't remember.
Well it wasn't always this way. There was a time a few years ago (~4?) where you absolutely could avoid updates.
I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
To me, the worst part is when GTK introduced what's known as "client-side decorations"[0], because that means that I can't use my normal window manager decorations.
If I force them on with something like gtk3-nocsd[1], then although I get my normal window manager decorations back, sometimes the client-side decorations have actual important widgets in them like menu buttons. When that happens, I end up with windows that have both kinds of decorations, and it looks weird.
For me this means that it's not nice to use apps like Meld and Remmina.
Just let me use my own WM's decorations please!
[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD
[1] https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd
My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
GNOME devs have a fixation on putting too much whitespace in every UI. They also conform so eagerly to the "Free Software UI" essay preachings---particularly the section, "Standing Up To User Pressure"[1]---thus they find it effortless to defend not fixing poorly presented frontends.
(My own app menu on a 24" monitor at 100% scale has: "LibreOffic..." as well as "LibreOffic..." and the very useful, underrated "LibreOffic...". I also often use "KiCad G...", "KiCad P...", and "KiCad S..." but usually never "KiCad I..." or "KiCad P...")
[1]: https://ometer.com/preferences.html#standing-up-to-user-pres...
Debian Trixie so Gnome 48 or so. Yes, program names truncated in the overview but when I hold mouse pointer over the icon, the full name appears. Not ideal, but I'm assuming borderline acceptable for discovery of applications by examining their icons.
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
It bothers me so much that Gnome is like this. The Gnome ecosystem has several programs and workflows that are, at least as far as I can see it, solved. Other than minor upkeep and and a new feature once a blue moon, they're done, and in an elegant manner. But I can't actually use Gnome itself, because the larger experience is nonsense to my brain, with questions like yours coming up every time I try to use it, which makes actually using it willingly a complete non-starter.
It's as if an alien made it, and they nailed certain subtasks, just because the requirements are simple and the path to something that works well is straight and clear, but the larger experience doesn't have many concrete requirements, and thus the road leads to something that does technically work, but which nobody* would want to use.
*Obviously some people like Gnome. Their brains don't seem to work the way mine does though.
> Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.
Last time I used GNOME, it had those buttons. Didn't know they removed that. They really wanted more churn, huh?
this is a fair point. I am referring to more "objective" things, if anything can be, in design. Let's take as an example the alt+tab behaviour with multiple virtual desktops. In GNOME, as it is in Windows too by the way, alt+tab cycles inside the virtual desktop you're in, allowing for efficient matrix-like navigation, and allowing to split tasks between desktops. On Mac OS, alt+tab cycles on all your open programs, making you jump between desktops. To me, this is rather unintuitive. It could be habit, but there is a clear difference in result regardless of habits, and I think the most productive choice is the GNOME-Windows one, and the more "intuitive" one in the sense of what a user might expect out of a virtual desktop, that is, creating a new desktop with its own apps. Of course this is my impression and I am well free not to buy a Mac :)
Debian Trixie Gnome 48 or so. In Settings | Multitasking right down the bottom there is App Switching with two options: 'Include Apps from all workspaces' and 'Include Apps from the current workspace only'. Debian has the all workspaces option set by default. Gnome Tweaks is installed, and the extensions to have minimise and maximise buttons on the right of windows are switched on by default.
(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).
afaik Mac OS doesn't have the option. If so, I still am questioning the default choiche ;)
You can do that same thing just a little different way. Say you want to go through all open apps in one desktop. On my mac its 3 fingers scroll up on trackpad then all windows are exposed. Basically the same function as what you want. Yes technically you are clicking on a window not the application icon but who cares.
Yeah, Apple's OS is clearly not designed for keyboard/mouse users. Triggering this on a standard keyboard requires using both hands (Ctrl-up arrow) and then switching to the mouse. Super annoying.
On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.
“Requires” is a strong word. Apple does have an extremely easy mouse-only solution for this and it dates back over a decade: map the fan-out selector (I forget what they call it these days, maybe Mission Control?) to a “hot corner”.
Yes yes we know, Fitt's law.
Hot corners suck. They either activate too easily or they feel slow.
[flagged]
it's not the same function since it's way slower than using the keys.
My experience was the same. GNOME is by and far imo the best DE on Linux when it comes to consistency and being the most accessible to non-technical users. However it’s far, far behind macOS’ UX.
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
GNOME 2 used to mimic Classic Mac OS UI, plus it was super customizable and easy to create extensions for.
Peperridge Farm remembers.
God I miss GNOME 2... I will never forgive the GNOME devs.
The whole GNOME 2 being replaced with Unity thing turned me away from desktop Linux entirely. I don't care if KDE or whatever exists now, I just want there to be one clearly most popular DE that does something reasonable.
> one clearly most popular DE
Okay, I guess, but that's a social wish about the preferences of others. It makes about at much sense as me wishing you just liked KDE. And at any rate it's not a technical or design wish that any software developer or team thereof can fix per se.
Now? First KDE release was in 1996, first Gnome in 1999.
Don't care
It's still around and what I use. It's called Mate now.
I was thinking on going back to Mate. Now I can happily vibe code any Gnome2 Plugin I want.
Worst case the code sucks but it's fine if I keep them for myself.
To make macOS remotely usable you need apps for switching windows, to reverse scroll wheel and many more. Ridiculous.
No idea what you are talking about, I need none of the apps you mention...
- macOS doesn't natively support "alt tab"-like behaviour (Cmd-Tab and Cmd+` are not analogous). You need something like alt-tab.app.
- You can't have the trackpad use "natural scrolling" and an external mouse use "normal scrolling" at the same time. The setting applies to all devices at once, so you need an external app (like LinearMouse) to use it.
That said, it's not like OSs and DEs don't have annoying things you need to fix (eg adding plugins to fix GNOME weirdness).
Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to use GNOME. There are a ton of window managers that run on Linux, and you can find one that works better for you.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
Mac is just a different philosophy. Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management. That is possible for you. There are several tools for this, e.g. Amethyst.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
> Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management.
Not really. None of the "window managers" for macOS actually play the role of compositors on Wayland or window managers on X11. macOS has exactly one window manager, plus a bunch of apps that run automation against it and sometimes call themselves "window manager".
> This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Most window managers (and the vast majority of the popular ones) on Linux are also like this. It's called a "floating window manager". Tiling window managers are cool but they're marginal even on Linux.
I spend time in the digital realm because I hate paper. Paper is a horrible analogue with real world limitations we should have left behind in the 90s.
interesting point, but in a real desktop, or multi-desktop setup, you can have different things on each one and look at them one by one, by table. The alt+tab default behaviour on MacOS is not that. This is my problem with their design choice.
It's dumb and pretentious
I've never used it that way ever since I was a little kid using OS 8. macOS even copied the Windows snap system, and I use it.
There's such thing as one DE being less convenient than other, but it's far less important than it being reliable and easy to get help with. We've changed DEs at work a couple of times, and it's never because of usability, it's because the old one became unsupported or wasn't compatible with something.
Same with X11 vs Wayland. I don't care which, I just want the one that works, and want to never hear about the other one again. Linux Mint comes with X11. It didn't work on my fairly standard PC because of something about graphics switching.
It's linux, you can do everything in the terminal. I've never understood what purpose a "desktop" serves.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
> Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities
Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.
These days I can say the same, I used to enjoy trying to minimize my mouse usage and fiddling with tiling window managers but now I just can't be bothered.
And the weird thing is that the type of mental effort required is not even a useful one per se, it's more like a strain (to me) than something that makes me sharper.
Still some things are easier in a GUI while others in a CLI, just depends on their nature and how often do you have to engage with them. But after a while navigating windows by Alt+Tab (Alt+`) or the mouse is fine really. I don't care to reach for Super+PgDown/PgUp when I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and scroll to change the workspace.
That’s a good way of putting it. CLI skills are specialized skills that I’m not going to use for anything else, whereas using a desktop environment is re-using skills I already have for other purposes.
Even when I do write code, I spend more time thinking about the code than actually writing so losing time to using my mouse doesn’t matter.
Do you adjust audio settings in the terminal? I've been moving away from using my mouse but anything related to audio or display settings intimidates me.
If I want to start a program I can click its icon in the taskbar, if I want to see my files I can click the file manager in the taskbar, and since these actions are done with the mouse I can simultaneously lie back in bed while eating trifle with a long spoon.
I don't see what point you're trying to make. Those two examples work identically in the OSX terminal.
You gotta add firefox to your PATH first, but yeah, this isn't what the terminal is useful for.
You can't use Firefox in the terminal
You can't use it "in" the desktop either, you just start it from there. Same as with the terminal.
Mostly yeah. The DE does manage the browser's windows and notifications if you use those. The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox, there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
> The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox
I was imprecise. I am solely talking about using a terminal emulator program on a display server, I wasn't talking about refraining from using anything outside a VTE. That would be pointless, yeah.
> there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
My point is that it is. Typing 'firefox' is way simpler to open the program, than traversing an application list and selecting it. The latter can become faster once you have a shortcut, but then it's equivalent to 'f<TAB>' or '!!' and the like. Language is more versatile, that's why we use it for fast communication. If you want the scissors from someone, you tell them, you don't make gestures or draw a picture, because that's way more work (unless you are mute).
- Why do I need a damn extension for everything in Gnome?
dios mio!
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
I got a third party replacement battery in my iPhone. The battery works just fine and the reason is simple, I no longer live in the US, where the phone was purchased, and if I want to keep my 2 eSIM slots, then I can't get the phone fixed in Hong Kong. Anyone who thinks Apple is very convenient has never lived in multiple countries, imo.
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
> Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
Simpler than that: money and control.
Marked up replacement parts for and the inability to compete because “not Apple certified” comes with disabled features.
The best part of market capitalism, no market! Pure profits because we make the rules!
What’s the deal with dual eSIM disappearing in Hong Kong?
In the US, iPhone 14 Pro has dual eSIM, in Hong Kong, it's 2 physical SIM. I'm not sure why they do this.
It's simply a phased, safe rollout.
Europe has a long tail of MNOs and MVNOs that don't support eSIM well enough. In China, SIM activation requires visiting a store, ID verification etc. so they only recently added eSIMs, and with limits: only Chinese iPhones can install a Chinese eSIM, and foreign eSIMs cannot be installed onto a Chinese iPhone while you're physically in mainland China.
I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.
Same here, I’ve gone from Apple fanboy to slowly dropping all of my Apple products as it becomes time for new purchases. They are just no longer looking at users like me. They keep focusing their efforts on things I don’t care about, while locking me out of control over my system more and more each macOS release. That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old… why bother fighting that?
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
> That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
The last Intel Mac was actually just 3 years ago!
The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.
This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.
Yes they do offer security updates for what, 7 years? That I consider “kind of ok.” Not great. And yes most Android phones are even worse than that. But OS and application updates? You’re dead to them after 4 or 5 years. AND the whole ecosystem follows suit, so if your Mac is like 6 years old, almost nobody is writing software that works on your system anymore.
My 2017 macbook air still gets security updates. And I play lots of games through steam.
My 2020 XR still gets updates and runs every app I need- uber, school stuff, office stuff.
There are a few projects that let you access iMessage on non-Apple devices. I've been using https://github.com/lrhodin/corten-matrix to relay iMessage to Matrix, and there's also https://openbubbles.app/ for something that runs solely on an Android phone.
Thanks, I’ll look into both of these.
I’ve managed to move all of my inner circle family and friends to Signal. We always had one holdout android user and now we don’t care that he’s on android. As a bonus, because I’m on a computer much of the day, I can use a keyboard to send signal messages.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
Thank you for your comment. We’ve charged F1: The Movie to your default card.
I just got my kid a cheap flip phone that isn't as dumb as I wanted, because it's got KaiOS, a FireFox OS offshoot. An undiscovered country with just a few thousand apps in their store, and a web framework to make your own. If HN would get into it like it's an e-ink display, we could have all the little apps we need, and no ads or distractions.
I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.
I have no loyalty, I've switched back and forth several times. I haven't concluded that either is better than the other, just different (and these days, not really -that- different). Though I do appreciate the tight integration between the iPhone and my MBP, that is definitely a sticky feature.
Well even if you think the iPhone UX is great, they'll change it for no reason in the next release.
Same here. Owned every initial iPhone but went to Pixel a little while back and it's a much better experience.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
>wtf their UX designers are thinking
I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.
I still use an iPhone, but somehow around the iPhone 6, the keyboard became permanently hard to type on.
right now I have the same feeling; some time ago I felt that entering the iPhone "mindset" made sense as you could gain in ease of use by sacrificing some "control".
Me too. Android for the most part has much better UI.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
I prefer iOS UX wise but I agree with you on keyboards, settings, alarms
Edit: and rotation
Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+
I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
I feel like Apple is always pushing the dev side forward in pretty awesome but small ways.
I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking
One step forward two steps back. Containers are cute. Used to be able to boot into another OS entirely just a few years ago.
I highly recommend Asahi Linux. It runs pretty well on MacBooks with the M1 chip.
Unless you want to use external monitors
There's the experimental Fairydust Branch which lets you connect a monitor via USB-C. However if you want to use more than one external monitor DisplayLink is currently the only option that works reasonably well. Unless you have a Mac with an HDMI port in which case you can use it.
There's work being done on that front: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1w2e946/thunder...
HDMI out works great on M1 and M2 chips, and DP alt mode output is nearly ready, and works if you compile an experimental kernel. I daily drive an Asahi Linux ALARM M1 Pro macbook, and I have almost zero complaints.
Does the experimental kernel finally support connecting to a Studio Display?
Yes, it does work with Fairydust, but you do need to use a USB-C cable in place of the included thunderbolt cable at the moment.
Hell yeah. I’ll be giving that a shot again this weekend.
I got tired of having to haul a separate HDMI display out for Asahi use.
> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I'm happy you also found yourself a good machine! :)
And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.
> Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.
No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
>Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities,
The whole iOS and Android keep copying each other and without someone like Steve being the editor they became pretty similar.
I want an iOS that is SIMPLE. And the software Apple is offering right now is anything but simple. Homescreen is now clustered mess. And for every banks, resturatnts all want an App for themselves, either you skip all the discounts and functions or now you have more clutter to deal with.
exactly.
IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.
Basically everyone is getting shafted.
Agreed, I swapped to iPhone about 4 years ago, because I couldn't find a phone for myself from a tons of options(one company did that, another did something else, etc..).
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I honestly miss my Windows Phone, solid performance and battery life. The platform was never big enough for there to be much issue with third party apps and I could write what ever software I wanted and load it onto the phone without too much pain.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
Wasn't Google ordered by courts to low third party app stores? So more freedom?
There have been third party app stores on Android pretty much forever.
Including app stores installed out of the box on GMS certified devices like the Samsung Galaxy Store (alongside the Play Store).
It just means they will be easier to install via the Play Store without sideloading (making other commercial stores more attractive but not really my cup of tea), and some minor API changes (although auto updating was added even before the ruling so not sure what else there might be).
Personally I'm not concerned about the changes to sideloading since it's a one time mild inconvenience. So I struggle to understand how going to iOS in protest (which doesn't allow persistent sideloading at all without workarounds) makes any sense whatsoever.
Google's original plan would have been really bad, but the new approach is a complete non-issue for me.
I feel the same way - I'll probably get a Pixel next. I had one many, many years ago before switching to an iPhone and it was excellent.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.
The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.
There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.
Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.
I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.
Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.
My biggest gripe with windows is it will steal your cursor focus from password prompts. And when it surfaces a password prompt, it does not focus it automatically.
I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.
Hilarious. But bad UX.
Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
But everything else I pretty much agree with you.
> Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that
It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).
> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.
It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.
> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.
> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great
The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.
> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder
The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.
> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.
> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.
I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?
The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.
Red = stop (close)
Yellow = yield (minimize)
Green = go (grow)
Makes sense to me.
It makes sense to me as well, but mostly because I’m familiar with the UI in-and-of-itself. This is a website for computer programmers mostly, we’re exactly the wrong people to ask if a UI is intuitive.
OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!
I love MacOS and it’s my primary OS and I couldn’t agree with you more on every single one of your points.
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
I remember Tiger. Leopard was such a huge upgrade for it. I mean spaces alone, come on, that was huge. All the trackpad gesture control came after Tiger too with the larger unibody trackpads.
The keyboard shortcuts are way more inconsistent on Mac. On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as entities. No such rule of thumb exists in Mac.
The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
Keyboard shortcuts on Mac are a lot more consistent than windows and Linux actually. On a Mac command + C / V is copy / paste. In Linux sometimes it’s control + c, sometimes it’s control + shift + c.
I guess what I mean to say is that there's no consistent paradigm for keyboard shortcuts. It's a lot more memorization and less real pattern to what keyboard shortcut will do what action.
And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.
You can set shortcuts to whatever you like on mac though
Does ctrl+a not work for you? ctrl+a and ctrl+e work for me across every app I use on my Mac.
It seems it does. Thank you.
That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.
Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.
These keyboard shortcuts are also used in emacs; I'm not sure if that's the source of their inclusion in MacOS or if they have a common ancestor between them.
What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?
The difference is when the current paragraph of text has line wrapped. Home on Windows goes back to the start of the current line, Ctrl+A on Mac goes back to the start of the current paragraph.
Oh, yeah I get what you mean. I think I've seen the one you want, it might be CMD+arrow key.
I have used a lot of systems, and inside them a lot of programs (I make design choices for a living, even if they are at a lower level, UX and intuitiveness exists also in libraries). I was comparing Mac OS to GNOME and not to Windows because Windows is almost the same as Mac OS relative to my point, just worse.
It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.
Yeah, I feel that in my bones. They've started down this road, and I don't know they'll be able to turn back.
yeah it took me years to get used to the nuances of MacOS after growing up with windows. Both are fine.
>> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.
I didn't mention Windows so I don't know where the person commenting got it from ;)
The only thing I could figure is that maybe they weren’t familiar with Gnome (which is like, fair enough, I don’t know what the window manager in Windows is called) so they thought the next sentence was irrelevant or something?
They are both infuriating, as a long-time user of both.
> I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
> The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze.
So you may be interested in GNU-like Linux phones with UI based on Gnome.
Unpopular opinion: The best UX I had on a phone was on a windows phone. The best desktop UX I remember was on Windows 8.1.
In both cases the UX was search and sorted app list. Lean and effective.
windows phones were very good design-wise, sadly no one made apps.
Not only that their design philosophy failed to penetrate. We are stuck with the bullshit and the bullshit clone.
Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form. They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!
gnome is not a distro but a desktop environment.
My daughter recently left me with her old M1 Macbook Air when she went to college. I decided to give Fedora Asahi Remix a try. It was great seeing that the install process was a simple "pipe curl to sh" from a domain I suppose I have to trust anyway. The most technical part of the install was making sure I waited long enough for the machine to shut down and then holding the power button until "Loading startup options…” appeared on the screen, popping in my local macOS username/password a handful of times along the way while the scripts did their thing.
To be fair, I did in fact get a "Donate to GNOME" interstitial shortly after I first logged in. My agent was able to disable that without too much trouble. I find it obnoxious that GNOME gets to grab my attention for a donation just because they control my UI, while the thousands of other developers who wrote key parts of my OS don't get the same privilege.
That aside, I'm absolutely thrilled with the combination of Apple hardware and Linux software. I can see this being my default "mobile device with a keyboard." It doesn't yet work with my external display, but rumor has it the folks at Asahi having been making strides on that this year. Until then my Framework and Thinkpad both have some more utility as workhorse machines.
I suppose M2 is the most recent platform that has "good enough" Linux support from Asahi, but my M1 fits the bill for most everything I want to do on a mobile device with an attached keyboard. I might pick up an M3 with 24GB to replace it at some point if the Asahi team can get external monitors, GPU acceleration, and sleep working well on that chip.
Said it for a long time. My biggest problem with Apple hardware is the software.
Things like Asahi fix that.
Except for VRR, HDR, touch id, video encoding and a sleep mode that doesn't drain your battery.
Absolutely. There is a long way to go but at least there is some good foundations.
No doubt it's anything but perfect, but I can give anecdata that my M1 just slept overnight while not plugged in, and I had 99% charge just now when I opened it up to check HN.
Whenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them.
They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.
[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html
[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck
Apple doesn't care. Most people ignore the ads, which is why Apple can keep adding them to first-party apps without pushback. Rage-protesting ad campaigns probably pumps the Apple ads KPIs.
There will never be a mea culpa from Apple because this has long been their end goal. Tim Cook made it extremely clear that services would be an internal pivot for Apple. It's a lifeline for their quarterly reports, a neverending frontier of captive users that all pay a premium to participate in status games. Apple customers might be the most lucrative advertising audience in the world, all Apple has to do is "protect" them from the bad advertisements and expose curated, trusted promotions that Apple users are sure to love. Then they sell it as part of the trust ecosystem, so that anyone questioning the value of advertisements gets called a malcontent that wants to force Apple users into an wild-west maelstrom of disrespectful, uncurated ads.
This sort of false equivocation "oh-we-can't-fix-it" attitude is how Apple kept their App Store monopoly, and it's how they continue to deny ecosystem integration to respectful alternative software. It's an insult to capable users and the core reason why I had to leave the ecosystem. There is no reason to pay a price premium versus Microsoft if my OEM begs me to Try the new Safari! or Get Three Months of <garbage you don't want> for FREE! My blood pressure goes up just remembering the stupid shit that Microsoft and Apple imposed onto "my" computer.
I mean, News is a collection of newspapers who pretty famously have supported themselves via advertising basically since forever, so complaining about ads in News to me is like complaining that a hamburger combo on a fast food menu includes soda. If you read the news, you get ads is a pretty normal social contract.
Sure, and the App Store is traditionally a place where advertisements appear above top search results. That's a normalized social contract, and it fucking sucks. It's a deliberately misleading design pattern that prioritizes ad sales over user clarity and immediacy. iTunes and Quicktime were never half as scummy as their modern counterparts are.
If you continue down this road of legitimizing user-hostile design, you will sacrifice everything you love about Apple. It's a Procrustean bed upon which good apps are hammered into service revenue.
They don’t care and will likely make your review hard to get to.
Yep, after being a huge Apple Maps advocate for years to family and friends, I have quit it completely after I got a pop up introducing new ads.
Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.
If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…
My unpleasant introduction to Apple Maps ads recently was opening it to look for nearby restaurants, and seeing an ad for a domestic violence lawyer nearby. Apple has now lost all credibility when it comes to respecting the user, not that they had much left at this point.
What I don't understand is that all of our data is being gathered everywhere for decades now, but the ads are still not targeted with any degree of precision.
Apple is not at Google’s level of surveillance-based adware. With these new changes to Maps, they now have new incentives to eventually catch up, but their targeting is bad because they suck at targeting, because they built their business around not collecting all that data & displaying targeted ads.
That said, if that’s the direction they’re going, I don’t need to help encourage them. I deleted Apple Maps off my phone & iPad, & switched back to Google Maps after like 10 years on Apple Maps. The hardware I buy is expensive enough & has profit margins high enough that Apple should never be trying to show me ads—targeted or otherwise—inside the basic functionality of their phones, and Maps is very much marketed as a feature of the hardware they sell. Also Google Maps is just better.
Disclaimer: I haven't used it for about a year, I simply don't drive enough at the moment - I doubt it has declined in quality.
TomTom is an extremely good paid ($6/mo) nav app - if you appreciate not being a product. It seems to now be named "TomTom Go Expert: Truck GPS" but does still have car mode. You _have_ to download maps, it's fundamentally offline. Routing is fantastic. They've been around since car nav was devices that you purchased.
The only area where it falls behind is finding businesses, but Google and Apple will probably always be rulers there.
I just installed Google maps after 4 years and man it is shitty with cosntant recommendations and nags too. I just want a map and search and directions. But Apple maps is sooooo shitty at those...
I find Apple is better at turn-by-turn navigation, while Google is better at business and POI data. I will usually look stuff up on Google Maps, but use Apple Maps in the car for navigation. Google's navigation is (last I used it) bad at telling me what's next. I'll turn, it will say nothing, then wait until I'm right on top of something to tell me to do it... I find it stressful.
I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.
CoMaps works really well as a wrapper of OpenStreetMaps. It even has seemingly-accurate hours for a few businesses near me! And if you are willing to dig into accessibility settings on the iPhone you can choose a good quality voice for navigation.
But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that
I never noticed that with google myself. I will say between apple maps and google maps that google maps is far more accurate for traffic estimates. You may be tempted to go with apple maps sitting them side by side when apple says its 6 mins faster than google. That is not apple maps finding some magic route. That is apple maps being dumb.
Try MapQuest. It's basic and has a charming theme
It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation requires more growth, and they're out of good ideas.
Look at any recent Apple revenue breakdown. If you pretend that the iPhone doesn't exist, Apple's most profitable market segment is services. Even the iPad and Mac can't dethrone it.
According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.
Apple Music’s margins are probably not that great. It does have to pay licensing fees, but everything else? Maybe…
I'd bet it's still well over 50% margins. At Apple's scale, royalties are pennies on each dollar you make.
Aren't the royalties usually revenue share deals with the record labels like Spotify has?
So that makes it really hard to make a lot of profit - as the royalty costs grow linearly with your revenue.
Yeah, royalty payments average ~60-70% for services where we can cleanly see the breakdown, and much higher for certain artists that can command it. Assuming the overhead for Apple and Spotify is 10% (big assumption), the margins are 20%, which is small for most SaaS. However, I assume both mostly use it as a loss (well, less-profit) leader as part of wider bundles.
It's like the business model of "make and sell things" has died in my lifetime.
My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
>My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience.
Same with my GrapheneOS phone. FOSS is a jewel to be treasured!
As for ads permeating our spaces, I think it's high time to implement strict ad control; the only place you should see ads is in the Yellow Pages, as listings. No more billboards, backs of receipts, outsides of shopping bags, not in newspapers (except classifieds) or magazines, not on websites, not on entertainment feeds, or anywhere else besides going to a directory and searching for a specific class of service or product. Also directories (stores included) must permit ordering by distance (strict, no algorithm foolery), cost, review count, average reviews, number of sales, and other criteria based on the data they collect; it should be as simple and reliable as sorting in LibreOffice Calc, with zero sponsored manipulation to advantage sponsors in the listings.
You'll go out of business without such Tom-foolery? Great! Your business isn't viable and is frankly a joke; go provide some real value instead you leech!
Sadly I can't use a flip phone as I am getting spam calls that my Iphone at least filters them out.
I want (and plan) to have a flip phone one day, but work necessitates that I have a mobile OS that can support things like MFA, unfortunately.
Why do you need a flip phone though? Just use your smartphone as you would a flip phone. Don't install ticktok. Problem solved.
I think I agree with the idea that it is better to turn the smartphone into the phone you want, but I think it might require a bit more work than just not installing TikTok :)
I doubt you'd see many ads in the iPhone Assistive Access mode, which can (sort of) turn an iPhone into a feature phone. You might also need to swap out a few Apple apps though. https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
Because the iPhone has some ads for Apple services baked in, which is what the article is about. But it's really minor. The people complaining about this don't actually have iPhones, haha.
You might want to check out the Bigme HiBreak phones, they're basically low-mid Android phones with e-ink screens. They work perfectly well for the dull functional things expected of a phone, while rendering all the addictive and spammy patterns pretty ineffective. I've found my one very useful as an intermediate step between a dumbphone and a traditional smartphone.
My flip phone runs a very limited Android, but enough to install Aegis for MFA. https://opelmobile.com.au/product/touch-flip/
I tried out dumb.co. Their flip phone supports maps, MFA, Uber, imessage/call forwarding.
I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.
Why though? I mean you can use your 13 mini like that and just delete everything but those couple apps you actually need.
Ironically: https://imgur.com/a/xHyiUzW
"We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field, before inducing seizures"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw&t=17s
Yes... We all want stuff for free that costs money to make, essentially insisting everything be ad supported. Then we complain bitterly about the ads.
(Remember when MacOS and Windows updates cost over $100?)
This would be a more potent critique if I could still buy an ad-free OS from Apple or Microsoft.
Windows licenses still cost $100, and Apple's premium is well-documented by now. Neither are poor companies, both are simply greedy.
A year or two ago my iPhone started showing ads for Kentucky Friend Chicken on the home screen. I've never been to this store, installed anything related to it, or even visited their website.
Apparently this is triggered by walking near a venue of theirs. Apple doesn't classify this as an app, it's a "suggestion". The huge sign at the mall that says "drink coca cola" is also a suggestion, that doesn't make it any less of an ad.
The App Store has had third party ad for years too. And the settings app has first party ads too. iOS is full of ads, it's the exact crap that users expected to avoid with Apple.
> A year or two ago my iPhone started showing ads for Kentucky Friend Chicken on the home screen.
Please, elaborate. Because this sounds like a very thin slice of the whole story. Where in the Home Screen? How did it show up? Notification? Live activity? Automatically installed app? SMS?
iOS, regrettably, features ads in some places, but I have never seen (or heard about) any of it showing up on the Home Screen by itself and I cannot even fathom HOW that would play out since the only for information to show up in the Home Screen is through widgets, and those have to be put there, or they are shown “intelligently” (notice the quotes there) on smart stacks IF you have the “suggest widgets” thingie enabled—but then again this would mean you have the KFC app installed on your phone and you use it rather frequently so I don’t think it would classify as an ad in any valid way.
Sounds like either App Clips or Siri Suggestions based on location.
Yeah, but app clips don’t show up out of the blue unannounced and Siri suggestions show up on Siri widgets or the spotlight/siri AI, which have to be purposefully invoked/put there.
It's sad such a great product gets wrecked like this, literally against its creator's wishes, then gaslights us too.
I am a small developer on iOS and the App Store Search ads are super frustrating. When users search for my exact app name, apple shoves 2 full screen ads on top of the search results. Sometimes, it's 1 search results sandwiched in between 2 ads which makes the user miss it because they scrolled past the ads.
Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.
I've always found it crazy that if you search for a brand name / trademarked name that it's legal for the search provider to shove a bunch of vaguely related shit above the results unless that brand pays for ad placement to be the top result. Sure, fine, put whatever ad pays the most at the top of the search for "best iOS game" - but when someone searches "Wordle" - that you can't rely on Wordle being the top result is a indictment of the whole ad-supported internet. (Sub 'Claude' or 'Discord' or whatever other search term and it's the same issue)
It's worse than that. App names must be unique, but if you search for the exact (unique!) name, the exact hit isn't even rated on top! I have the app "Bit" on the app store and you have to do quite a bit of scrolling, even if you don't count the ads.
Same problem here too. I have a game called "Unscramble!" and it's impossible to find it with that name. I have scrolled for many pages and can't find it. Meanwhile, many very old apps which haven't been updated in many years are showing in the results.
when i am looking for a specific app on the App Store, I never use the app store to search. I search the web and look for a link to it on the app store. Mostly it's faster that way.
As a user this also drives me crazy. I want SERACH RESULTS not a fucking full screen ad or maybe even TWO screens worth. Absolutely shit.
That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.
Their damn hardware is so expensive, they should never pass an iota of a thought about putting ads in their software.
John Ternus says Apple has 'so much' opportunity to expand services | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924814 | https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/27/john-ternus-says-apple-has-so...
Ternus to potentially squeeze more out of App Store | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589193 | https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/09/06/gurman-schiller...
(Apple put "Ads" under the "Services"-umbrella)
It's lousy that you can't turn off the badge notifications for the Settings app, which is where they push this garbage. I'm still on iOS 18, and I just have to live with a red '1' on my Settings app because I haven't updated my OS. It also pokes me every week or two to update.
It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.
In my experience, you can generally dismiss all of those by tapping the thing and then just not doing it, if you do that 3 times.
After 3 taps and the thing still hasn't been done, Settings usually seems to stop showing the badge or reminder anymore.
You could move the settings app to a less-used home-screen page, or you can remove the settings icon from the home screen entirely.
It's mildly annoying to have to do the swipe-down-and-search to get to settings but it's not an app I use all that often.
And the b0rked that with the new Siri - I had to turn Siri off today because I literally couldn't get to an app unless I knew its location on the Home Screen.
Yeah, I've not pulled the trigger on this yet. I assume I'll get a new phone before too long and then will be forced to use the current OS.
It's not just iOS. Final Cut Pro on MacOS now regularly advertises iPadOS Final Cut Pro (which is a paid SaaS tool). Professional applications (arguments about Final Cut Pro X not being all that professional notwithstanding) that advertise like that are almost non-existent in the pro audio and video industry; an Apple pro app advertising, would have been heresy a few years ago.
And yeah, it drives me crazy. It's one more, wildly unnecessary, click.
Logic is one of the last tools keeping me tethered to MacOS. I've got 26 years invested in it, but the moment I open it up to record something and see an ad, it's over. Ardour and Bitwig will suffice, even if it means flushing tens of thousands of dollars of software down the toilet with it (the core suite of plugins I use).
I'm tired of unnecessary speed bumps in the creative process. It's why I no longer use a Roli Seaboard (what wildly awful software).
Apple continues down a course (addicted to ads, even their own) that I've seen few recover from.
The title had me thinking they had actual adverts open to advertisers. It's not, just someone winging about apple advertising icloud+ and some other stuff in their settings app where you can directly enable it. Come on you lot, this is fine, it's like the least ad driven mainstream commercial platform.
They show a notification for that, which is super annoying.
Apple Maps now has ads... er, sorry, "preferred listings".
No, it’s not fine.
The least crap of the crap is not a laudable position. I’m a big Apple fan but they need to stop this shit with advertising. The amount of advertising built in to a $1,000+ device, including ads for the device maker’s own services, should be exactly zero.
The App Store app is filled with ads. The search in particular shows 2 full screen height ads now before results.
Funny to read claims like that on techradar, that showed multiple pop-up frames around the 'article' and on top of it. But they haven't added an image of that 'ads'. No you have to read and try to understand what happened.
I thought the exact same thing. Of course, a key difference is that those of us who choose to pay for an iPhone, use iOS, and often pay for additional services are already giving Apple our money. They're trying to extract more and more from us and it's honestly insulting. I give techradar credit for providing us their user-hostile experience for free.
You can use ublockorigin on firefox to solve the problem. You can do nothing about system ads on iphone
Yep, I had trouble reading this article because it was entirely covered in ads.
Using the internet without an adblocker is like refusing to use a condom
You are free to use an adblocker or the "reader" view in your browser.
This is a solved problem and you are not utilizing the solutions.
Tech radar has to keep the lights on somehow because they’re giving the article away for free.
Apple you paid a lot of money to already.
Everyone is sticking ads everywhere now.
I swapped supermarkets the other day because Tesco’s search now has several sponsors at the top of every search - and they’re weird keyword matching that doesn’t even work so you get nonsense products.
Search for ‘mint’ and you get 2 rows of toothpaste. Who searches for toothpaste by typing ‘mint’? Of course it’s bloody mint flavour. I want some actual mint.
They've had ads for years. Try not upgrading to Tahoe and you'll get a popup every week advertising their new os
I set a do not disturb that runs 24x7 to turn that off
iOS has essentially been nagware for a long time now. I switched to android because everything iOS does is to continually put focus on iOS. So many nagging prompts, so much broken/misleading configuration. iOS is now the hellstew du jour. Android is with the exception of Gemini, a peaceful computing platform.
Also developing for iOS which I did for a long time will turn you off iOS when you see how slow the apps are and how unreliable the OS really is.
Personally, I think iOS is a rolling disaster and its influence on MacOS made macs no longer worth it. If Ternus wants to do something. Scrap iOS.
I'll say this again, why must every technology and every product we ever build devolve into an Ad-serving platform?! Farrrk me.
This is not new, I remember seeing those for the whole year (till potential Apple care promotion expires) when you buy a new phone years ago, and yes, they stay for weeks or longer.
for the first time in many years it’s these ads that have me looking at Android devices seriously. it’s the fact that they can’t be easily dismissed that bothers me the most (although clearly annoying even if they were quick to dismiss)
Maybe they're trying to train people to be OK with the red notification badge and just accept unread notifications as part of life.
I really don’t get this. Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons that are really beneficial and great products that make sense.
I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.
But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.
AFAIK you can click them away.
It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.
I have a subscription to Apple+, 2 TB, $40 month plan.
I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?
$40 for only 2tb? Extortion.
Nah - Music, TV, Fitness etc all included. All shared with the family (and extended family) so it doesn't have the friction of piecemealing it all together, which I value more than anything.
I've tried clicking them away and they keep coming back. E.g. my current watch is about to hit a year old and doesn't have Apple Care. I clicked away anything about the Apple Card in Wallet and I just had it sitting right at the top when I was trying to get to my boarding pass last week. I have no idea why it keeps telling me about Apple Fitness or Apple Music each time I purchase a new device, I was aware of it the last 6 times it tried to push those.
I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.
> Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons
That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.
From the article, many users report being unable to disable them:
> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."
> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.
There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."
Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.
Yeah I feel like this is the nuance that gets lost.
I hate ads, but mentioning other first party services feels very different than selling parts of the system UI like a billboard.
These service upsells should be dismissible but they seem fairly inoffensive. The App Store ads, on the other hand, are just atrocious
People are being intentionally obtuse in order to find something to get mad about.
Obviously offering add-ons to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.
Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.
If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.
What are the free software alternative phones/tablets and how do we concentrate our support so at least one of them is successful?
best bet is currently GrapheneOS and that is still Adroid and will likely have to fight an up-hill battle in coming years
there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible
but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.
The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.
Reach out to Fulu, this should be a project.
https://www.fulu.org/contact-us
Decent companies listen: I suggest contacting support; if enough people do it they might realize the errors in their ways.
I had a similar experience with promotional notifications from Hyundai: I suspect I'm not the only person who called their support saying, "I don't want ads from a $70,000 car."
Today, I emailed Craig Federighi about the ads in App Store search results as well as Apple Intelligence models eating up 30 GB on my Mac mini despite it being turned off.
Let's see if anyone listens.
Glad im moving on from apple
I use NextDNS on my iPhone and I don’t think I’ve ever seen these ads in years of usage. I lay my coups dollars a month for iCloud family storage but that’s it.
There’s some irony here about an ad-filled tech blog complaining about ads.
I don't think it's entirely the same situtation with ads on a blog you read for free vs ads on a device you pay a lot of money for.
This is clickbait. The way they put "ads" in quotes every time shows they know what they're doing. I've seen some other comments here complaining about ads in Maps (which I've never used and can't speak to), but this article is specifically calling out the long-existing practice of Settings showing a little badge on new devices that says "You're entitled to some free months of Arcade/TV" or whatever. That's not an ad, or an "ad."
It's definitely an ad, but it's also been there for years now. And of all the ads I encountered across various platforms and spaces in real life, these are about the least obnoxious.
Agreed, clickbait. The only reason I clicked the article was because I _didn’t_ see any new ads after upgrading iOS, so I was curious what they meant.
> new ads
That's the thing, though. Those modal offer popups have been in macOS and iOS for a really long time, and does cheapen the experience like Microsoft and Google products do.
Huh? That's an ad for one of Apple's services.
[dead]
I thought Apple could sell us privacy as feature because they don't sell ads .
I guess Apple is shooting their foot by selling their user data for ads because of money.
Betrayal?
What can you expect from a phone that most people "rent" from their carrier or even directly from apple now.
I've suffered the iCloud ads for almost 2 years at this point. You can't dismiss it, or if I can... the badge only disappears for a day and then it's back. I wish I could turn off iCloud completely, I have no use for it and do not want it. It sometimes hijacks files that I wanted to keep local-only.
The irony of this site having ads that cover 1/3 of my screen on mobile was absolutely lost on the author.
In a few years, Apple will be indistinguishable from Microsoft when it comes to dark patterns, and all the mystique/enchantment will have faded away completely. That's just the works of the """free market""".
It's not a """free market""" when a company is able to use a government-granted and -enforced monopoly to keep people locked into the company's proprietary app store.
There absolutely is a market for a new 'premium' smartphone maker to arrive.. But given the hardware prices currently, we are stuck with two companies who are purely now squeezing every cent they can out of us while destroying their experience.
Two companies? Apple and who else? Google? Samsung? Xiaomi? OnePlus? RedMagic? Trump Mobile?
Okay, probably not the Trump phone but all the other's I've listed make some pretty great (and expensive) options.
Apple and Android. If you can name one Android(Google) luxury phone I am willing to listen. OnePlus used to be the one to go to.
I named five companies that if you search for "$COMPANY_NAME flagship" you will quickly find relevant models.
Now if you are looking for luxury phones, that's a different thing. Something from Vertu would likely qualify. They are expensive and are made from high end materials, but the phones themselves aren't that special.
Wow, I've joked twice in the past two days about Apple becoming Microsoft and it's completely true.
1. Can't turn off Siri easily, turns itself back on.
2. Apple search not things it should obviously being able to find, just like Windows search.
3. Ads in the operating system like Windows 10+
> Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
When you have willingly agreed to live your cyber life exclusively in the inside a golden jail, don't complain when the COs decide to collectively abuse you.
They have had that with Apple Music ln MacOS when pressing play on BT headsets... Can't be removed on locked down machines...
Yeah, I kept getting a notification about purchasing and extended warranty for my AirPods, which was annoying because it shows up in the same place as OS updates.
I find it ironic that I am attempting to read an article that says what it says while 80% of the screen is ads and asking me to register to their notifications.
Ads on Maps were inevitable. Google does it too. Those services just cost a ton of money to run. (I know the article talks about other ads too.)
I haven’t seen any of these. iOS 27.0, in the EU fwiw
GrapheneOS + Neo Store + FFUpdater + Aurora Store do not eyerape you with ads. Just some food for thought and consideration.
OSMAnd~ for maps, SimpleX + Orbot (and VPN for calls) for secure telecommunication, JRPN 15C & 16C for calculator, Collabora Office for spreadsheets, BravePipe (or NewPipe) for YouTube client, Silence for automatic call rejection (reject all callers not in your contacts for example, and regex/rules-based), ... need I go on?
Apple must be trying to accelerate making smartphones as unappealing and contemptible as cable television in the past 10-15 years.
The irony of this website being so loaded with ads that I can barely read the contents is palpable :P
But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.
I didn't pay $2000 to view that web page. A new iPhone, OTOH...
(But, yeah, I'm reminded that I need to set up a Pi-Hole on the Starlink in the camper. I'm paying by the byte for those TechRadar ads.)
What ads? I’m trying to find these in settings at the top per the article. I don’t see any.
We really need to tackle the cancerous nature of "advertising" as a problem at the civilization level.
This is exactly the moment Elon has been expecting to launch his always connected phone, offer superb quality, with unique features at a price even higher than Apple and I know for sure it will make inroads in their market share. Give devs all the tools and the ecosystem will surpass both iOS and Android, just like Huawei is doing in China
Options is all we need, and tools to customize them. And just like Blackberry or Nokia, they will learn the hard way
I think he is busy launching typesafeai analog and chatgpt plugin market more. Anyway, why need phone if you have slave robot?
I don’t see them. Greetings from the EU.
Also greetings from the EU. I recently saw in the settings:
- Ads for Apple Care
- Ads for Apple Fitness+
- Ads for iCloud stuff.
But only once? They can be dismissed, no?
Meh. Apple ads in settings is a nothing burger. Ads anywhere else is degenerate and another matter.
But I don’t get to finish the article for all the ads on the website. 1/3 of my phone was filled with a banner at the bottom. 1/8 video player, and then a sign-up screen covered all.
Enshitification world order will lead me to use the phone less. So there!
I want to pay a premium for no built in adds and a more secure product.
If that goes away I will have no reason to buy apple.
Google does this as well with Google Workspace with administrators. It's super annoying.
Haven't those ads been there for years? Pretty sure I've seen them for years.
Yes and they are the most unobtrusive “ads” you could possibly imagine. This thread is weird. There’s even a guy in here shilling for an unreleased “Elon Phone”.
Long time Apple user of over 2 decades, 10s of thousands spent.
Between always-listening Apple Watch, the upcoming cameras of Airpods Pro, Siri AI forced on us for functionality that doesn't require it, ads, them not giving a damn for obvious easy fixable issues like App Store search, and other shit like not adding step counter complication to older Watch models, I'm seriously considering not moving to Android/Windows, but giving up parts of the "smart" ecosystem altogether. Fucking expanding of ads are the last nail on the coffin. Even the few they snuck in were more than enough, the correct number of ads in an OS or app that's not a browser should be zero.
Started going to smaller brand earpods (maybe will even go back to wired except for gym), started to leave my Apple Watch at home also except for gym, and even for that will just go get a fitness band, and not buy any new Apple Watch models, and am seriously considering one of the "minimal" phones or even a dumb phone.
But how will they serve relevant ads if they don't collect data??
Why put it in 'quotation marks'. It's ads, not 'ads'.
Because they’re not. They’re just a little added row in the Settings app exclusively.
And you can dismiss them.
The ‘ads’ appear even if you are already paying for those services of the ads
I literally couldn’t read this page because of the amount of ads.
Apple promotes other Apple products in Apple products. End of the world. This yellow press is annoying. "Journalism". All this outrage to fullfill daily quota of text output.
And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.
Is this a bigger problem on iOS 27? Should I continue to stay on 18?
The article then ends by displaying an ad for Apple products.
Can't have ads and tell me you're privacy focused.
Ads and tracking don’t have to be related. Physical ads in magazines and newspapers are still ads, but don’t report on who you are. Similarly, if you have a service connected to an account on your OS, it knows which tier you are on and can try to upsell you.
I’m not defending ads or Apple here, far from it as I hate what they’re doing. I’m just saying that while we’re used to privacy invading ads, not all ads have to be so.
I mean sure but reality is pesky. Most ads buys are targeted. Once a company has accepted putting ads in, difficult to know when they've started allowing information gathering. Technically it is already the case that companies sell targeting information before they accept ads even.
Where are these ads?? Are they when you open up a program?.
> Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered.
FWIW, it's quite easy to get rid of them. Repeat three times: tap it, then decline the offer. After three times, it doesn't come back.
Also, they usually seem to be for "free" things, like 3 months of free Apple Music included with your hardware purchase. Or reminders to set up Siri or Wallet when you first set up a new phone. Or to install an eSIM.
Techradar complaining about Ads while it's showing three different full-screen popups while trying to just read the first paragraph of the article is certainly a choice
Was watching Ted Lasso, and Three Little Birds by Bob Marley came along. As I paused the show for something unrelated an advertisement showed up for buying Three Little Birds on Apple Music. Nope. Big fat nope. I already paid you. Go away, you w*nkers.
I went to Apple to de-Google, 5 years in and I just went to GrapheneOS to de-Apple (and re-Google just a bit too much for comfort but ok).
The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".
Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).
I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)
so let me get this straight you pay more than 1500 bucks for a phone and then you get ads delivered to said phone?
Thank goodness... I thought I was the only one complaining. Ever since Apple started putting ads in the App store, I started referring to them as an "ad company". Every time I search for, say, "Signal" and see the first result be a "promoted" link to "Whatsapp", my blood boils.
F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.
I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!
All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"
Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.
I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.
In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research
Sad to see Windows has no more moat
A true Microsoft-like moment for Apple.
If it wasn’t broken I wouldn’t mind
The one I have is also lying to me, it says: "Activate iCloud Storage - An iCloud storage upgrade is ready to be used with your Apple Account "account@icloud.com". Continue"
I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.
I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.
Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.
I suppose you haven't seen the messages that come when you accidentally turn on photos in icloud and then run out of space and try to turn it off?
They somehow manage to threaten you that they'll delete your local photos...
Well, the thing that confuses me is that I am not running out of space I have a 2TB iCloud plan already and it has plenty of room.
Your ads are probably incompetence while what i'm talking about is straight up threats.
Fair point, I agree with that.
its funny reading an article like this and seeing 5 ads across it
I like to buy music. I usually buy from iTunes but I hate that they keep pestering me for rent for their subscription service.
The latest think I've noticed is that iTunes now advertises at one price but actually bills me at a higher price (79p in iTunes, £1 on my credit card).
If Apple behaves like every other manufacturer it will stop being worth the premium.
> There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work.
Welcome to my world where "Show fewer shorts" on YouTube has been clicked I dunno anymore how many times, it's an habit now
Comparing the Settings banner to the Start menu banner as seems a bit overblown. One you only see when you open settings, which is typically not daily or even necessarily weekly for most people; the other you see potentially up to hundreds of times a day, every day you that use your device. This article would have been a lot more meaningful if it had focused on the Maps app’s ads and the News app’s ads (by Taboola!), which do actively interfere with the quality of experience delivered and are enshittifying services provided, or the Game Center “try this other app” ads that float over other apps and can’t be disabled, in order to make the point that the badge ads were in fact the earliest harbinger of the slippery slope we always fear everything to be. Lacking any actual investment of effort along those lines, it reads more as wahmbulance chasing than meaningful news.
I didn't realize they were ads.... this is weird
But Apple must enshittify all Apple products because it increases shareholder value. Else an activist shareholder will arise and accuse Ternus of dereliction of duty.
True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.
This will eventually destroy their privacy stance.
On another note, this ad is still being shown to people who subscribe to the iCloud service. It cheapens Apple.
At this point Privacy is mostly marketing semantics.
Apple has loads of hostile behaviors like this. For example, tracking users for their own marketing, but showing unsettling dialogs about "allow third party tracking" instead of "customization".
They're a hyper competitive (and often anti-competitive) company , and kudos to them, but it's odd that the community hardly criticizes apple to the degree MS , Facebook or Amazon for the same practices
It's a little disingenuous that I can't toggle notifications for Settings.app off in the Notifications section of Settings.
An article complaining about adds serving me add for their own service scrolling a page down.
Are you fucking kidding me
"Just don't look at the ads! What's the big deal?"
St. Allman, the saint of the church of told you so, bless this post. Rich ar the hard ones in principles.
can we all switch to gemini the protocol not the AI i cant even read this article how did we do this to ourselves
What are you talking about? Apple users love ads. Dial it up a notch, force users to only watch ads. They'll pay twice as much.
the quotes around the word ads are pretty infuriating.
Enshitificaion!
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I'll never forget when an employee at Samsung asked on their internal chat why the built in Weather app has ads, and they turned them off. https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-remove-ads-2735914/