> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience.
YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!
It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?
ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.
This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original email for the purchase and click the link in there.
> This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already bought in your own library it will promote different versions of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and really manipulative and really sucks!
How are you browsing your Amazon content? I see search bars on the 'All Content' [1] page, and also on each individual page, like my movies and shows [2].
Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're looking?
Roku based TVs and their mobile app. And the website - #3 in your list above. Never seen those other two links, and they don't show up when you're trying to watch things on your tv.
Yeah shame it’s hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and infectious scam ads. Literally unusable without an ad blocker. (Which you should use anyway but it means they’re not a great choice for Joe user on his unprotected windows pc)
A bit deeper into the scene, there are no ads anymore. And the biggest problem for most people in the west, is rather just using torrents without a VPN will get you lawyers letters quite quickly. But Joe average can use youtube downloader without danger.
The principle of torrents are, everyone downloading has the ip of all the other participants for p2p to work. All it takes is one node recording that other nodes send copywrited data to them, to get the real adresses of them (via ISP).
yep: seedbox + this + jeyllfin = unlimited streaming of anything i want for $15/month. no ads, no terrible app UIs, no autoplaying previews, no content getting removed, not having 4 different streaming subscriptions that are hard to cancel, no fuckery at all.
I set this up for my husband who barely knows which end of a PC to use. He's filled up the 4TB media array and now I need more disks (or better retention policies)
One, people should be using uBlock Origin as you mentioned. Two, there are many search engines without such ads. Three, qBittorrent has a search right inside the client, there is no need to even access the websites to perform searches.
You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.
Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)
Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.
I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now.
Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.
For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).
iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at Windows.
This is especially egregious in the Books app on all platforms. I dream of a version that presents you with your library on launch instead of the store — good user experience would expect you to be opening the app to read books 99% of the time, not to purchase new ones.
Thankfully, on macOS, you can disable the store in the Music app entirely. This will probably be removed at some point. When disabled, the only remnant is a small username in the bottom-left corner of the screen. I would love to see this gone as well, but local libraries are increasingly of no concern to Apple or the general public so I doubt they will fix this.
Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine. However, you have to question if that’s what most people who use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don’t necessarily have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad supported free music streaming services if they never pay for music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.
Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.
Android allows changing, and disabling, the default though. Last I checked, trying to open an MP3 will demand the Music app on an iPhone, and clicking an Apple Music link will do the same instead of allowing one to open a webpage
It's a general trend with hired managers who optimize for their bonuses. Also many founder led companies when they got sold to the shareholders are also optmizing for that. Some founder led companies are optimizing for something else, not profits only, but that's rare and that's what Jobs had the leeway to do when he got back to the almost bankrupt company.
Current minions will try to squeeze more profit from any screen the incentives are such that they'd do that.
Enshitification is possible where there is some kind of lock-in and the pain of leaving is greater than the level of annoyance of the product. Apple has one of the strongest lock-in ecosystems and it's rational for them to do so.
I'm not sure there is a better way, because max freedom = open source, but that equals mostly subpar experience for the average user. Let's hope for more platforms and data transfer from one to the other.
Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted links but they're not as prominent.
The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite literally half the screen.
I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
> Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always* places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
> I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost less time to find out than writing this comment ;)
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue (due to inflation). Until we measure, define, and value experience in nominal terms through data, most leaders won't care because it will remain an estimate against hard data.
>> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26 they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music from iTunes Store.
I disagree.
You can disable all the apps—in fact never use _any_ app if you can avoid it altogether.
Apps are inherently bad, and the web version is always better.
It didn’t have to be like this, but here we are.
I often go weeks without opening any app but the browser on my phone.
What do you mean "modern"? I'm using iPhones since 4S and I don't think that Music or iBooks workflow changed, it's largely the same. So probably Steve Jobs was OK with that.
Um, no? Apple Music wasn't even a thing in the iPhone 4S timeframe. You used to buy music in the iTunes Store, and play it in the music player app.
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.
> If I honestly thought Android would be any different
I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android. All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB) organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android tablet, phone and a generic cloud backup folder with SyncThing. I don't subscribe to any media service (and never have).
My music library/player is PowerAmp, my ebook reader is the open source KOReader and my podcast app is Podcast Addict. None of them has a store and they are all free (although I did upgrade to the plus version of PowerAmp to support the developer). They all get regular updates, are highly customizable and have every feature I want or can imagine wanting. My browser is Android Firefox with uBlock Origin so I don't see any ads and for YouTube I side-loaded Revanced Extended from the open F-Droid store, which is a clone of the YouTube app with no ads and all dark patterns removed. I also run a side-loaded open-source DNS-level ad blocker for the occasional social media app.
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 that still works great (I did replace the original battery last year which took ~20 mins). I'm using a five year old phone not because I'm cost conscious, I'd happily pay >$1,500 for a new phone and I keep looking at new models every year but never see anything that would be a noticeable improvement for my usage. Really... I swear I'm NOT trying to be @SimpleLife or minimalist/retro, I have a significant yearly budget for discretionary toys, but some years I struggle to spend it all because I'm also allergic to things that are constantly low-grade annoying or that I can't customize to my prefs. I just refuse to adopt anything that wants to own me instead of me owning it.
I haven’t used an android device in 2 years, but I was just like you for almost a decade. At some point I got tired of all the micro-annoyances that I had with android and my oneplus phones (my last one was the oneplus 7T), such as awful brightness sensor, terrible compass, suboptimal gps, and low quality vibration engine. All stuff that you’ll never hear about in an actual review, for some reason.
My music player is an app called “Music”, and my ebook reader is an app called “Books”. I have spent exactly zero seconds looking for these apps since they’re already included with the phone, and are not developed by an unknown hero that could be hit by a bus at any moment. On books I read books that I bought from the iTunes Store, and epubs or pdfs that I downloaded online. I can access the epub files of both my own and the store-bought stuff from my mac’s filesystem. Everything is fully synced to all of my other devices through iCloud, a service which I’ve spent zero minutes setting up and zero minutes maintaining. These apps have all features I need, since all I want them to do is open my files and keep track of progress. They’re not customizable and I don’t care about it. I could download open source apps from the App Store or alt-store if I wanted to.
I pay 3 euros/month for my cloud storage. It works and I haven’t had problems with it. I share it with some family members. My browser is safari with uBlock origin lite. Admittedly I had to spend some time looking for a decent ad blocker, it’s not as easy as android.
I’m also not trying to live a minimalist or retro life, although I appreciate the ideology. My main philosophy right now is just that my phone is a tool through which I read books and listen to music (among other things). It has some limitations, but they’re not important. I don’t want to have to think about setting up a media server to listen to music, or figuring out syncthing settings once again because it’s been 3 years since I last set it up and it now broke all of a sudden. I just want to not have to think about this and get on to more important aspects of life.
I do it similar to you, except that I use PlexAmp for my music.
But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g., Spotify).
That said, though, at least we have this option. But is there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is available to them as well.
My understanding is that Firefox on iOS is substantially limited from Windows and Android. Like they can only run uBlock Origin Lite and many add-ons aren't available. Something about Apple policy blocking browser extensions that can run scripts/code, as it might compete with Apple's app store. But that's just what I've read online from other people. It also might be somewhat different recently in the EU, at least about the installing alt app stores. As I said, I haven't used an iOS device in over a decade, so have no first hand knowledge.
The Music app on iPhones went from simple and usable to an absolute dumpster fire pushing a subscription. Even with a subscription it's incredibly maddening because of the terrible UX and show-stopping bugs (Literally failing at playing music!).
The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26 since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own library.
The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
My favorite "bug" was when that dumb thing refused to play because I forgot to stop playing music on my Mac for whatever reason (sometimes the play was actually stopped, it was just unable to resolve state).
Spotify has other issues, but at least as a streaming player, it is smart enough to tell me when there is something playing somewhere else and it even allows me to keep playing while just switching the output.
If at least they had kept it as a good app to manage local music, but even that has regressed. Don't get me started on suboptimal use of space.
I have a hard time following the Apple advocates, it has become quite bad for the price you pay, there is really no other conclusion that is reasonable.
Apple's beancounters have figured out that they just have to be more polished than Microsoft and Google's environments, and despite the legitimate complaints you've made, they still are.
Precisely. This is their "Have the cake and eat it too" strategy, where so long as they aren't as egregious as their competitors, they know it's a Net gain as most of their customers will still feel the grass is still greener in their wall garden than elsewhere. Even if the grass isn't near as green or well kept so to speak as it used to be.
This is why you should always pirate digital media, even if you bought it.
A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.
I always pirate the media i buy and/or the physical books i buy.
Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can take… good notes on the pages).
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
> Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store
As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms. Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial.
My frustration with Apple when I tried it out was that you either use iTunes or there's little other choice. Technically some choice, yes, but because most people are passive and use the Apple stuff by default, there's a smaller community of developers who are motivated to try to compete.
When I see people criticize Notepad in Windows (for example) it feels irrelevant because you're not expected to use Notepad for anything but the most trivial use cases. There are so many other, better options, and the platform has a culture of exploring those options.
Microsoft used to have one of the best media players around! Windows used to have built in streaming support from device to device. You could load up music on your personal PC and play it on your home theater through your Xbox360! Windows Media Player was huge, only eclipsed by Winamp at the time.
Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)
They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn sucked all the air out of the room.
They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!
Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)
(I was there first hand to witness it again and again!)
Bill Gates is terrifyingly smart. He sees trends decades ahead. But knowing something is coming (smart TVs) does you no good without timing.
You build a first gen product, accrue mountains of legacy tech debt in the process (being first is hard! There is no one else to learn lessons from!) and then a competitor comes along and makes a V2 when the market is more ready and they can implement it better than you because they can learn from everything you did wrong (possibly also hiring half your team away).
Timing is equally important as product. Making a smart TV before widespread broadband adoption? Before streaming video had a flood of high quality content? Oops.
Real Player was doing streaming video in the 90s! Everyone knew it was the future, it was obviously the future! The future is now and the majority of video is streaming from a server somewhere!
Great idea, but ouch that timing. (That said, founders got rich anyway, and real video was a necessary step to where we are now!)
Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets. Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience waiting for AR/VR.0
There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but way too early.
Sure but “be second” doesn’t help that first mover. What incentive is there to innovate if your product is doomed to fail? What can a company do to both innovate and develop a viable product?
Are the corporate structures and cultures necessary for this just that different?
If Apple puts ads in its Maps, there will be an opening for a gorgeously-skinned OpenStreetMaps app. Possibly even with a $1/year WhatsApp-style subscription.
I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.
I haven’t used Apple devices back when they were good so I have always avoided all the built-in Apple bloat/adware.
Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software.
It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.
As a Linux user, I feel like a different breed here: I'm pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from now will be pretty much the same, and I'm happy about that.
> I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app
That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.
Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here.
I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.
> "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill
I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.
Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc
If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained.
I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff.
Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products.
I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question.
That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.
So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.
About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed.
And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.
This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.
I've worked in consumer electronics, batteries are built in because reviewers will endlessly trash a product that is just 1mm thicker than anything apple puts out, and they fawn over apple because the products are so thin.
If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back problems".
A small exaggeration? Not by far, reviewers nasty about device thickness.
Then 70% of people shove a case on and it really doesn't matter.
There are good water ingress reasons for non-replaceable batteries, making a device water proof and have a replaceable battery does add a good deal of thickness.
Anyway, you can get a battery replaced at a phone shop for a reasonable rate anyway, so IMHO it isn't as big of a deal now days.
I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.
Worse still, if you’re too polite, many people won’t “get” the message.
“Oh, he just thinks my baby has interesting and unique features.”
> I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.
I agree in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum, we're talking about Steve Jobs. A dude who would semi-regularly send coworkers and subordinates out of rooms in tears, throw shit around the office, and in general make a complete ass of himself.
Like, I agree with you, it's gonna be hard to tell someone their baby is ugly. There's a better way to do it than throwing a stapler at the wall above their head and calling them ugly too.
I don't mean to pick on you in particular but we seriously need to shred this societal idea that visionaries, rockstar devs, auteurs, whatever, have to be anti-social fucking monsters to make whatever they happen to make. It's stupid and it sucks and it excuses tons of abusive behavior. I'm all for making great shit but if you have to hurt people to do it, then I don't think it's worth it at all.
I once worked for a leader who wanted to be like Jobs, complete with the black shirts.
So anyways, going into a design review I (UI dev lead) had warned early on that the new design was bad. I said it was going to be bad. Listed why it was going to be bad, and politely gave my feedback to UX, and I was ignored.
Walk into the review, it gets torn apart. It was really horrible. The GM looks over at me, asks for my take. I reply that I gave my feedback weeks ago and I hadn't approved of the design.
GM proceeds to lay into the UX team, swearing, yelling, and such, and basically asking why they hadn't listed to my initial feedback. It ended with an ultimatum that henceforth the design team was going to listen to me if I said no to a design before they wasted his time.
We were at the time outsourcing UX work to an obscenely expensive design firm who hasn't done software work before, just physical media. Some of the team was good, but a few of the designers were violently incompetent.
(A short time later we nixed the entire team, hired the good ones, and built our own,amazing, internal UX team.)
I'm not sure how I feel about the situation. It was nice to be vindicated, and rockstar personalities rarely listen to polite level feedback. "Fuck you don't bring me shitty designs and bill me tens of thousands of dollars for them when the fucking dev team can tell the design is shit" is kind of a legit response to people who just won't listen.
It does sour relationships though, and IMHO some of that relationship between me and the UX lead took years to rebuild.
I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs… the names of three people that have built multi-trillion dollar companies!
Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.
Being nice just doesn’t work as well.
It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply, it’s actually opposite-is-better because it sounds more nice when you don’t say how things really are.
It’s fun to watch from the outside as people try to futilely fight against human nature.
PS: Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos aren’t the nicest people in the world either, I just haven’t heard any stories of them making people cry.
> I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs…
Is this supposed to be a positive point? Gates has exploited numerous legal maneuvers to create yes, a gigantic software company, and one of the absolute largest blights on tech as an industry. Name a Microsoft product that doesn't suck ass. Elon Musk hasn't done a fucking thing, he got lucky with PayPal, bought and booted the founders of Tesla, and has been coasting on it ever since. And since he fired his PR team his public image has gone to shit and all of his companies, save Space X and only because of generous Government contracts, are going down the drain.
> Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.
No, being an asshole is what one can get away with once one has struck it rich in tech. For all the shit talking I would do about Jobs, and do it I will, he is the only one on this list who did it in the direction you're talking about, where he was the asshole first, who THEN built a ridiculously successful business. Gates was a nepo baby who got access to computers at an incredibly young age when that was borderline unheard of. Musk would've never left his mothers basement if not for his father's wealth.
> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
Ah, you're also in your mother's basement I see.
> There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply
We haven't been meaningfully part of evolution, survival of the fittest, since the first of our ancestors picked up a rock and tied it to a stick, and leapt to the top of the foodchain. We are by virtue of social networking and tool usage, apex predators. Nothing has been a threat to us in the "nature" way for thousands of years and nobody thinks otherwise apart from weird alpha-male guys who follow incredibly shit nature "science" to justify their unhinged anti-social behavior.
Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.
But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.
Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials), and then steve just told everyone they were holding their phones wrong.
Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.
I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact.
His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.
Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.
The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
The magic of Jobs is/was he truly was a self-starter and self-taught man; he had the rare mix of traits necessary to be a visionary.
Frankly I think Jobs saw Cook as a key operator to ensure the firms future survival and future growth; I'd imagine Jobs foresaw the tremendous impact the smartphone would have and all Cook had to do was be a shrewd operator as Apple had built such a huge advantage over competitors by the time he was dead.
He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul of the company, if there is such a thing.
Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.
> I think Steve would have changed with the times too
That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.
Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases.
(But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)
Of course we don’t know. But regarding this specific example, bear in mind that Apple is in vastly better shape as a business than it was in 1999. So if that argument didn’t work on him then, it doesn’t seem implausible that it wouldn’t work now.
Or the opposite. The Apple might and/or its execs might think that they are in such a dominant position that purposefully lowering UX to extract a few extra pennies from their users won't cause any short term harm.
While back in the 90s the brand/reputational damage might have destroyed them.
Back in the 90s, Apple had zero brand or reputation. It had a few die-hard Mac fans and a bunch of inherited deals with public school district purchasing departments from when the Apple II dominated. They licensed Mac OS to clone manufacturers like Microsoft did with Windows. They were essentially already destroyed and waiting for the eviction notice.
Jobs, with Mac OS X and the iMac, absolutely created the unassailable perception of quality and user experience Apple is known for today. The term "reality distortion field" was used a lot in relation to how much Jobs sold Apple and the Mac in keynotes.
So it's completely fair to use his well-known positions against the company's current practices.
Yes, exactly. They couldn't afford to crapify their products for short term again and hope to survive. They wouldn't be here if they did that. Now they can.
> well-known positions against the company's current practices
Companies generally don't really have values besides maximizing profits. People working or leading them might. But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at most.
Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable.
Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.
Necessary, beneficial, has more upside than downside, whatever way you want to slice it.
> Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares
I feel like this is actually support for my argument that people change over time (either naturally, or to adapt to the times themselves changing): I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
> I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
Agree, but personally I don't respect Cook and agree he seems to have sold his spine sometime around when he sold his soul. I got the sense that Jobs wasn't drifting toward increased greed but rather, a knowledge that he and Apple both had more than enough "F-you money" -- to do what they thought was best for the product, knowing that that was also exactly aligned with the long-term interests of the company anyway.
Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it.
Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.
>I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product.
It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.
The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope they abstain. But it’s really not too offensive in my opinion.
That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.
I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point.
If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.
This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.
genuinely the worst opinion I’ve seen on HackerNews
there are such better ways to enable these experiences without introducing the zero-sum, scam-inducing, corporate fuckery game that making it a pay-to-win ad-driven experience gives you
I’m also concerned that boredom makes you want to see ads
That sounds absolutely awful, honestly. I wouldn't want to see any of those things mess with the "natural" order of search results for whatever I've explicitly searched for.
I do agree with you in theory, though their 'attempts' at this kind of thing are comical if not absurd (witness the organic search results in the App Store).
Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot on growing revenue from services.
Which is kind of sad because they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad:
- just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.
- make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.
As for services they could go other way:
- be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or charge end user more with subscription.
- make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
your chart shows total revenue but not per category but even so it shows the last 4 years revenue didn't grow that much as before and its mostly growing because grow in services revenue.
you can see in your linked chart that everything is pretty much flat except services in the last 4 years. iPhone revenue in 2022: 205B, then next to years down (201B) and in 2025: 210B.
They don't put MacOS on iPad because they want MacOS to slowly die and make App Store the only way to install software. This has nothing to do with cannibalizing Mac.
It is worrying that the machines many of HN rely on are the minority of their revenue so they'd not even flinch financially to mess up that product line. TF for Linux/x86/arm as an alternative ecosystem that is not controlled by one party.
probably some sort of "ai" app builder interface. They've always flirted with the layperson programming with their languages like hypertalk. I wouldn't be surprised if they figure out a way to achieve even greater lock-in capture
Explain like I'm five, how does a multi trillion dollar company expect to keep growing revenue forever? Are they planning to keep enshittifying user experience until revenue dives?
No one knows, they are just trying to kick the can as far as they can and escape the inevitable coming back to Eartb of the stock price. P/E is currently 36. Everything plateaus. The human population is plateauing. The SP500 is now 2 standard deviations from the mean and that’s as far as it has ever gone.
you omitted the most important 2 words from my quote: "growing revenue fromservices". If you read other part of my post I shared ideas how they could grow revenue without enshitification.
After that saturate they can keep innovating like xiaomi - they build plenty of useful home products so apple can as well.
Timmy is too worried about the goddamn stock price for that. They could easily just transition to a company that isn’t promising stupid growth every quarter and just pays fat dividends on a portion of the profits.
The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager, everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, there are major CTAs that are essentially "black on black" and practically not visible below 50% screen brightness and not acceptably visible at max brightness. Just last night I noticed the browser tabs will render full color content behind the text. It's so bad I've been considering cataloging screenshots and writing about it, because some of it's laughably bad.
> The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5 was revealed a year after Jobs stepped down as CEO and his death shortly after. The design was almost surely locked in while he was still CEO.
I spent a few hours trying to debug some fixed position issues with my JS/CSS code recently.Found out that iOS Safari fundamentally broke fixed positioning. How do you break `position: fixed`?
Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.
I have no doubt that the team behind Liquid Glass had the same noble motivations as the team behind Microsoft's Metro Design Language in 2010.
In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!
But there's a matter of taste as well as novelty. And while there were many incredible things about Metro, history bears witness to how much Zune and Windows Phone and Windows 8 have become beloved household names in the decade-and-a-half since.
I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
> I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
Agree. Jobs took big swings like Liquid Glass but, perhaps the most important part that’s missing in present Apple, he was obsessive about ensuring the swings were executed to a high standard. He was hands on in this pursuit.
It’s actually weird to me that a company so large, so well compensated, so profitable, so prolific, etc can’t seem to care enough about the details without a Jobs-esque foot on their neck type leader to be afraid of.
Without a Jobs-esque foot, the bozos have nothing to fear. They flourish and spread, gain power by impressing other bozos, and push out anyone with half a brain.
MobileMe’s devs were brought into an auditorium for a dressing down that included the lines “you should all hate each other for letting each other down” and in response to “what is MobileMe supposed to do” got a “Why the fuck doesn’t it do that”
The smug dopes that are left over in the design department are probably clapping each other in the back over shipping liquid glass. Tim doesn’t give a shit about how ugly, troublesome, and problematic it is. Stock price go up, whatever!
I don't think Metro died because it was bad as a matter of taste. Quite the opposite actually, I wasn't a huge fan of its aesthetics but I was surprised by how many people liked it.
No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself - it was actually very good in that department, arguably still the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the devices ended up being very limited overall because there were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).
Iphone user here. I have to admit that the IOS UI/UX has become really tiring and at times I'm utterly confused by inconsistency, a total contrast from the early days IOS when everything was consistent and intuitive. The silver lining is that I am using my Iphone less and less.
I am running the latest iOS 26.1 and it's still very buggy. The most annoying one is that anytime I either restart my phone or update the phone (which restarts it), the wallpaper changes to all black.
That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen icons didn't look so ugly with black background.
I ran a reverse image search on the image of Steve Jobs, and couldn't come up with anything, so it does appear that it might be AI generated, which I don't approve of.
Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous person doing something he never did.
Honestly, there should be laws against gen AI models creating fake media with real individuals. We're going to end up with a massive mess on our hands once the video starts looking more realistic
This author is a man who worked closely with Steve Jobs, and the photo was obviously AI generated, so I think this gives him leeway to do such a thing.
It isn't obvious to you that it's AI? You had to look it up? Please get more familiar with actual photographs, maybe skim a few AI free photo sites or, oh, I don't know, buy a few coffee table photo books and develop some discernment, because that one is about as obvious a fake photo as a stick figure would be. It's truly gross.
Who cares? He’s dead. I know that sounds harsh but this obsession and worship of founders has to stop. Companies are people or so says the Supreme Court. So now that the company exists it’s bigger than any one person even the founder.
The company he built is now an order of magnitude more valuable and hardware is the best it’s ever been.
It’s maturing. No company stays nimble and vibrant and agile forever. It’s paying a dividend for Pete’s sake.
All these callbacks to oh no apple under Steve never would have done this … yeah well it’s 2025 and he unfortunately got cancer and died from it. Apple as a company lives on and new leadership should be free to take it in any direction they seem justified.
Yea i also think this blind steve worship needs to stop. He was great back then but who knows what he would have done nowaday.
The situation is different, the world is different, apple is serving much more consumers, the company has much more employees, more products, more markets.
And i get it, the software they put out nowadays is pretty terrible and could be much better and everyone is frustrated but this constant steve ressurrection needs to stop.
To be fair — and I love my Mac — macOS isn’t as snappy as Linux in my experience. And yet I still rock macOS because it just works and slow app load times are just a small price to pay for things just working. YMMV of course.
Yeah especially since it probably wouldn't take long to scrub through some WWDC presentations of his to find him holding up his hands like that (or a gesture of comparable meaning)
They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search. For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple? (Now the first result for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok is at least the correct first party ad, though this almost seems like extortion on the part of Apple.)
(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)
Standards sure have dropped. I saw a new iPad mini in store, on display, and it simply couldn’t run the home screen without stuttering and visible frame rate drops! At least in my mind, this seems like a transgression from Apple’s former standards and that’s before the accessibility and visual challenges new iOS has.
I don’t care about whatever Jobs thought, but honestly I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better.
Their hardware is still amazing, but I’ve had enough issues with software quality and Cook’s penny pinching philosophy that I’ve bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux.
So far, the experience is making me question whether my next main driver will be a MacBook.
Yep. For the first time I'm really considering Linux as a personal / desktop OS. Currently I just use it for servers. But now for the first time I don't think I have much to lose by leaving the Apple ecosystem.
Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings app became an upsell app. I'm sorry I came here to change a setting not dismiss a notification on your latest failed service thing that requires 20,- a month.
> It’s the product ladder with artificial limitations like low fps screens
This one really pisses me off as someone who just had to upgrade their 2018 iPad Pro. The air would've been great, if it had a 120hz screen. I really don't need any other "pro" feature but I refused to tolerate 60hz in 2025 when every other device I own including my big desktop monitor is 120hz or more. But no, I have to spend an extra $500 for a higher refresh rate. I didn't even want the pro, I want a 120hz air so I can get the colors I want.
Nonetheless, because my screen was broken and I needed a new iPad, I forked over the money for the pro. Conveniently, they use two different magic keyboards so now that I'm "locked in" to the pro ecosystem, I'm forever stuck buying iPad pros unless I also want to have to buy a new magic keyboard that works with the Air line if they ever release a 120hz air.
Apple can easily differentiate the air from the pro in numerous other ways besides refresh rate, and yet they still continue to ship 60hz screens.
Yep. I have two un-dismissable notifications in the Settings app for two different AppleCare products. Can't dismiss them - you just have to have a red notification icon until they expire. Just turn off badges for the Settings app right? Sorry, the Settings app is mysteriously missing from the Notifications options.
>> Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings app became an upsell app.
I didn't really notice this until I setup an iPhone from scratch for someone. I normally just move from one to the other. The nagging from Settings is outrageous. It will never stop telling you to setup Apple Pay and Siri and offering Apple Care. It was like the experience of buying a PC in the 2000's.
iMessage is only popular in US, I rarely seen someone using it in europe or asia. For movies and music people have spotify and netflix these days. There is only small hassle for non-tech savvy to move photos.
What's with this uncanny AI Steve Jobs photo? I hope blog writers have red lines too.
The sentiment of this article seems to be praising Jobs as a protector of user experience. And the author doesn't have the decency to use his real face?
I will never understand why some companies turn away from some of the core principles that got them to their position.
If it’s market pressure, it tells me that Cook doesn’t really believe their future roadmap is good enough for growth, so he needs to hedge with other things that make the product worse. Of course those very things will hurt future growth. That’s how an upward spiral turns downward.
I feel this strongly. From a business perspective, when your competitors expand their revenue avenues through ads you have three options: copy them to catch up, do nothing and perish, or lobby the government for increased consumer protections. The third option isn't being taken, but I believe its the right one for many companies that want to remain customer-centric, and that have real values.
the thing that you're missing here is that Cook is gonna get roasted if he doesn't take every opportunity to maximize growth. That means the future roadmap as written PLUS ads in maps and other decisions like that. There's no such thing as enough.
Not having ads was the thing that separated Apple from Google. Apple was winning by selling hardware with software that didn’t need ads to support the business model. Ads just feel greedy, especially when they are still charging a premium price on many things. How tolerant will people be of high prices when the resulting product feels cheap? This is a race to the bottom, which was a race Jobs was unwilling to compete in.
I am checking this carefully.
The red line is here, for me and I think for many Apple customers.
I choose Apple for being different from other companies, for valuing customer experiences and for rejecting ads and other "insults" for users.
I think that if they cross the line, me and many other customers will leave.
> I choose Apple for being different from other companies, for valuing customer experiences and for rejecting ads and other "insults" for users
Yes. The point of willingly putting yourself in the walled garden was that the experience was definitively better than the other options.
When the walled garden ceases to be better and starts adopting all the same dark patterns and user hostile experience as everyone else, what point is there in staying inside?
The hardware is still marginally better but the experience is no longer better. In fact with android at least you can sideload and install full powered ad blockers. At some point once the iOS experience degrades beyond a certain threshold, android will be a more attractive option.
From the perspective of a casual user, on Android you get mobile Chrome which doesn't do extensions at all, while on iOS mobile Safari has extensions including ad blockers.
Where will you go? The alternatives seem worse in almost every way.
> and I think for many Apple customers
Unfortunately, I think people who care about this enough to leave are a rounding error. It’s why the entire consumer product market looks the way it does.
I don't understand why car-based things can have ads or updates that popup or things like that. My car (2024 Subaru) + Android Auto is so restrictive that I can't even type a search query into the screen while I'm parked, I have to speak to it. Yet, while I was out grocery shopping the other day the thing popped up multiple times asking me if I wanted to start an update "That would require you to turn your car off for 5-10 minutes"
It popped up a second time as I SLOWED DOWN at a red light. I didn't even come to a complete stop but apparently that was "stopped" enough for it to pop up.
Not to mention while you're using Google Maps the whole time it's popping up asking "Is that cop still there? Is there still construction?" and they're looking for you to click on a button on the car's screen that indicates yes/no. However, when I'm parked at a rest area trying to look for the nearest cracker barrel it'll start navigating me automatically to one that's 45min in the wrong direction instead of just letting me pick which one I want to go to.
And now, ads will show in Apple Maps? Ah yeah, when I'm driving is definitely the best time to distract me for your own greed!
It's asinine. Obviously the "Safety features" are just performative. Probably so they can force us to have a mic enabled or something. It's bs.
They will always put ads into everything. Doesn't matter what they say, eventually someone's gonna show up and notice that money is being left on the table by not advertising to all those users. Paying them just makes your attention even more valuable.
I probably sound like a broken record, but the death of Apple won't come from being behind on AI, from losing developer support, from bad products or services. Fundamentally, it'll be because it is optimising for being on the stock market and chasing endless revenue growth.
All other issues I've outlined is a symptom of that fundamental issue. Apple is losing its soul.
The author suggests Steve would have done something based on what Steve did in the past in that particular set of circumstances. But it's not fair to suggest what Steve would have done today, given where Apple is now. Would Steve have said "screw it" to the share price and just ran the company with the same ethos? Maybe, he was bold like that. But then he also had a Board to answer to.
I don't use my phone much other than you know, for calling and occasional messaging. For me the most annoying is constant asking of password in both phone and mac. It's so secure.
> and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience.
"brutally" is the only factual part, otherwise he harmed the experience plenty, often for the sake of appearances
Goggle also had a memo on how ads were bad and rejected the idea ... until they didn't, with the same founders, so you don't need much of a leadership change for the strong incentive of ad money to dilute the resolve.
I don't think apple executives understand what made apple so successful.
Or maybe I'm out of touch ?
I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
But to me, i buy apple because this a premium device that is well thought out and doesn't make me waste time on advertisement, dark pattern and other bullshit i don't have the time nor the will to care about.
I ditched windows for macos after the candy crush saga in start menu and just the overall philosophy of windows 10. For instance, not being able to decide if I want to update and when.
I ditched Android because Google made me loose so much time with their ad riddled services, and their app professionalism is abysmal. It constantly change, no user interface is the same,...
For all these reasons I bought expensive apple devices and I tolerated the many bugs, often having to restart my iphone once every day.
Now if you're going to monetize me just as the other and make me waste my time fiddling around on apple maps checking if one thing is an ad or something I actually want to see, I'll just buy the cheapest thing I can get.
There is no reason to pay premium for the same quality.
But that's just me, maybe they know something I don't. Brand fidelity, especially in the USA is strong, people don't want to be that guy who has an Android ? iPhone are status symbols in China ?
I think you can point to the actual day Apple started this decline they're still on: September 16 2015. That was the day Apple News was released, which I think as a product perfectly encapsulates near-everything wrong with Apple in one convenient package.
Yea the sizing seems wrong. Hands are way too big compared to his head. Could be a weird lens/angle though.
If it is AI wtf is it even doing there though? It adds nothing. A quick search returns a bunch of images where Jobs looks annoyed or trying to stop something.
> Some time ago (1999-ish) [...] a number of ways to integrate ads were discussed.
> One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. [...]
This sounds so weird in 2025. However, I can see that probably in those times there was no "norm", and people were trying different things.
Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup might be the norm. And who knows how many similar things we dodged because of people like Jobs.
Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the ad-supported tier for a very long time now.
These days, we have moved to far more insane schemes. E.g. smart TV manufacturers are patenting detection of static frames to show you ads while TV is idle (although I don't think anyone has actually shipped that yet).
I buy from Apple for privacy and the their respecting users and being "classier" by not putting ads in their apps. That is the reason I pay the "Apple tax". I think this is very unfortunate.
It's very likely that the "privacy" advertising is largely a sham too. As Senator Wyden proved, Apple can be compelled by the federal government to conceal spyware in iOS and its supporting systems: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Hardly surprising given how they reneged their stance on in-OS advertising though.
This 'red line' was quite apparent around 10.14 when macOS and iOS were set on the collision course we see today in Ta-hoe. So much wasted visual space in the last 5 releases, making room for touch.
I doubt we'll see a pseudo macOS mode on mobileOS, but the mirroring for iOS in the last 2 major releases of macOS is just a jump to the left of local emulation.
Yep. Information density and compact but efficient UIs were definitely an advantage of macOS. Now they are on track to emulate the big buttons of Windows so what's the point ?
To be fair, ads on a map aren't the same as Windows 11 start menu ads – the former are useful and contextual.
I feel the story being told would be more equivalent to what Microsoft is doing rather than Google.
That said, advertising is like a virus, and every company and product is eventually infected by it. It's too tempting to not monetize your customer's eyeballs once you have enough of them.
I actually consider the windows start menu ads less objectionable. At least you can turn them off (for now). There is no way to disable ads embedded in the maps app. And it’s only useful and contextual if you’re using the map to look for somewhere to spend money. I rarely do this. I’m using it to check traffic, get directions to somewhere, or exploring out of geographical curiosity. In all of these use cases, ads are an unwanted distraction.
I think they’re trying to replace the hole they expect when the app stores are forced to be open. It is sad they lack any plan other than ads, it’s a complete lack of imagination from what is supposed to the one of the most innovative companies on earth. I feel this is a more worrisome signal than anything.
I haven't had an iPhone in 15 years, but have been considering going back for my next phone as mine is over 5 years old. I had no idea it had gotten this bad though. What a pile of garbage. Ads in the map app?
Whenever someone says, "oh Steve Jobs would have done / would never have done X", I always remember the scene in Silicon Valley where Laurie says "Monica, Peter Gregory is dead"[1].
Steve Jobs has been gone for a long time. Other people have taken his place, and Apple has been very successful since. While Jobs might have been very successful in his vision, a lot of things have changed since then, and it's very reasonable that the current apple execs might not align with what his philosophy was at the time.
I don't know... ads in maps is very, very different from ads in the OS.
Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments. Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment.
Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to expect it for free, with basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it. I suspect that most users think that ads are a better user experience than not using it at all because they won't pay $9.99/month for maps.
Maps is also a search engine, and ads are the primary way to fund search engines. I guarantee that if Apple every launches iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
> basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it.
> iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
See, I disagree with your entire premise here. Apple, unlike Google, has a very very profitable hardware business which provides so much to the bottom line that they don't have to operate Apple Maps or Apple Search or Calculator as a self-sustaining business with its own P&L. It's stupid to operate as though they must.
The correct thinking (in my not so humble opinion) for a long-term-minded company is to recognize:
1. That massive firehose of money allows them to make Maps markedly better than what Google can afford to do. Since Apple gave up on UI/UX design excellence, this ability to not rely on ads is arguably their only remaining differentiated advantage.
2. Part of what allows Apple to command such monster-sized margins is that (usually... so far... outside of the App Stores at least) their product is not packed full of sleazy ads that significantly detract from the experience. You don't just get to fully enshittify the product and still command the same high prices as you did when you were offering a premium product. A Porsche covered in wraps advertising porn sites and penis pills, which plays loud AI-generated ads on every screen all day long would not sell at the price a normal one does.
Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.
We develop for iOS, so we need to register a bunch of Apple test accounts once in a while. Every time an account is registered, you get around 5 emails of ads. WITHOUT ANY UNSUBSCRIBE links.
Apple has already cross a red line, it stepped over to one that has little interest in user experience. Recent releases of MacOS and iOS and iPadOS have given rise to Windowsesque complexity and ugliness. I have used Macs since the Classic, and am sad to say I no longer ascribe to the cult of Apple.
Local businesses with better quality usually have better ratings in maps and better economics—higher margins, repeat customers, lower acquisition costs. And since only nearby places can compete, you get real competition on merit instead of a race to the bottom with faceless actors. Good ads solve a real problem: helping people discover great spots in unfamiliar cities.
Jobs saw something with iAd.
The problem is simple auction mechanics favor whoever has the deepest pockets. A mediocre chain with fat margins outbids an amazing local place, even if the local spot delivers way more value. You’re optimizing for who can pay, not who’s actually good.
To fix this, you weight bids by quality signals like ratings, time spent and repeat visits.
Now ads amplify what’s already great instead of just selling visibility.
Users get better recommendations, good businesses win, and Apple builds trust. That’s how you turn ads from a tax on attention into actual product value—and an improved user experience.
I'm actually an apple convert, and I'm going back with my next new laptop purchase. About 8 years ago I got my first macbook at my first tech job and really loved what I was able to do with it as, essentially, a really fancy linux UI. Now it's a bloated linux UI that disrupts my ability to get work done, so I'm switching to a machine and OS that respect me.
Decent short article built around a personal anecdote with SJ. The AI slop image of SJ at the top was such a turn off it was hard for me to respect anything this fellow had to say. It's a real shame that people feel the need to include images like that, presumably to draw attention on social media embeds, but it's just gross seeing death porn like that.
Apple Maps has always had subtle ads. They show various stores and shops at different zoom levels in your town, some requiring very high zoom levels meaning you wouldn’t stumble across them.
>It didn’t matter that customers would be free to choose a version with or without ads. He didn’t want any user to see the OS polluted in this way.
Another subtle but distinct user experience cost of this would be that every user is given the option to choose between one option or the other, and that is already part of the user experience, and it has a cost.
It's similar to the idea that more options are not better, you can't just keep adding more settings and levers and pulleys knobs on the task bar and the settings and the profile and the customization tab and the control panel, and the privacy center, etc...
Each choice has a UX cost. Even if it's technically outside of the software and it occurs at the shop. The product line is the first part of the experience, will you choose a product? a product XL? A product XL Pro?
> ... I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily similar “opportunity.” ... 1999-ish ... Lee Clow and I were invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac system software. ...
Not that I like ads, but - Late 90's Apple, fresh out of a near-death experience, is an extremely different context from today's Apple, with it's 12-digit annual profits and #4 spot on the Fortune 500 list.
Speaking simply to your comment because I'm not aware enough of their behaviors myself, wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a high Fortune 500 listing potentially be enough to make Steve say "We have enough honestly" obviously that's not the norm, most companies just seem to find any way to extract every ounce of our souls but I thought that was where Apple was supposed to differ, at least under Steve.
Uhm, is crossing?? Mate, you're going to have to reverse direction and travel back about eight years to find that line.
I feel like most of this is Microsoft's fault. As MS lowers the bar for what's acceptable on Windows, Apple just has to be somewhat-obviously better.
Additionally, Google's ad-driven economy set a low bar with Android, but that platform has always been that way. Together, those platforms make it really easy for Apple to posture as being considerate.
Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.
Use an MP3 player from before the iPod existed and then try an iPod classic. Same with smart phones. There is no way you're going to convince most people that what you say is true in any general sense.
Sure, simplification means having to have some opinionated ways of doing things because you're removing options, but there's a very real benefit that can come out of it.
If anything, it makes the current state of Apple that much more sad.
I had an MP3 player before the iPod. It was a CD-based player, and it was pretty good.
I think, iPod was really one of the first users of 1.8" hard drives, so it was better than the competition simply because Apple had access to better hardware.
I disagree. Apple had no monopoly on 1.8" hard drives nor most of the other components in the original iPod (except maybe the scroll wheel itself?); they were merely among the first to apply it into a media player. It was the UI that was groundbreaking. You could switch from an album, to and artist, to a playlist, to a specific song all within seconds with your thumb. CD-based mp3 players were ok, but were battery hogs and updating playlists/music/etc was a hassle as one had to burn CDs. The UIs for most were "useable" at best.
Apple did have clever, original, and good marketing, but the product (iPod) was so clearly better than anything that came before it, either way. And that was my original point against the prior comment that the customer experience was just "be like Steve Jobs" and then it's good.
The first Apple iPods only had FireWire which was exotic here, so they were not at all popular. I had a Rio (Nitrus, I think?) that was released within a year from iPod's release. When I first interacted with an iPod a couple of years later, I was not at all impressed.
I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on point. Its marketing was great, however.
This might be the worst take I've ever read on this website.
I'm a lifetime Mac user who has bought exactly one iPhone (the 3G S) before switching to Android. I'm definitely not in the Jobs reality distortion field.
But I do remember how the iPod was better than every similar thing at the time, and how people spent _years_ clamoring for Apple to harness that same focus to make a phone. Apple had to go out and buy the iPhone name because that's what it had been colloquially called for years before it was announced.
There are plenty of things Apple has done wrong, many by Steve personally, but you can't seriously claim that his taste was only applicable to him.
Don't denigrate the meaning of the word "abuse" to make your hot take spicier.
as someone who bought the creativelabs mp3 player back in the day, the ipod was absolutely better and I was just being some combination of cheap and contrarian
It was much, much better than an iPod. I had an iPod first. I gave it away, because it was too heavy to carry around.
The Zen Stone was essentially weightless and could be operated without looking at it. The only problem I ever had with it was that it couldn't charge and play at the same time.
> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience.
YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!
It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?
ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.
This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original email for the purchase and click the link in there.
> you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special
People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.
> This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already bought in your own library it will promote different versions of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and really manipulative and really sucks!
Look kid, buy something or get out!
It's true, and it sucks. But at least I didn't pay Amazon $1800 for hardware first.
How are you browsing your Amazon content? I see search bars on the 'All Content' [1] page, and also on each individual page, like my movies and shows [2].
Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're looking?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/a... [2] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/v... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/mystuff/library
Roku based TVs and their mobile app. And the website - #3 in your list above. Never seen those other two links, and they don't show up when you're trying to watch things on your tv.
Torrent sites have amazing search ... just saying
Yeah shame it’s hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and infectious scam ads. Literally unusable without an ad blocker. (Which you should use anyway but it means they’re not a great choice for Joe user on his unprotected windows pc)
A bit deeper into the scene, there are no ads anymore. And the biggest problem for most people in the west, is rather just using torrents without a VPN will get you lawyers letters quite quickly. But Joe average can use youtube downloader without danger.
I’ve torrented for decades, never received such a letter.
Even with full encryption?
What do you want to encrypt?
The principle of torrents are, everyone downloading has the ip of all the other participants for p2p to work. All it takes is one node recording that other nodes send copywrited data to them, to get the real adresses of them (via ISP).
They hire dedectives to do that.
There is https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr
And nzb360
yep: seedbox + this + jeyllfin = unlimited streaming of anything i want for $15/month. no ads, no terrible app UIs, no autoplaying previews, no content getting removed, not having 4 different streaming subscriptions that are hard to cancel, no fuckery at all.
I set this up for my husband who barely knows which end of a PC to use. He's filled up the 4TB media array and now I need more disks (or better retention policies)
It means it gets a lot of use, so you can justify larger disks! Isn't that great?
Better ads with free stuff than ads with paid stuff.
One, people should be using uBlock Origin as you mentioned. Two, there are many search engines without such ads. Three, qBittorrent has a search right inside the client, there is no need to even access the websites to perform searches.
And the client has optional web UI, so you can order a download from your phone and watch it on your TV (through jellyfin or plex).
You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.
Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)
Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.
I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now. Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.
For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).
iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
Would love to know that block list.
The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at Windows.
This is especially egregious in the Books app on all platforms. I dream of a version that presents you with your library on launch instead of the store — good user experience would expect you to be opening the app to read books 99% of the time, not to purchase new ones.
Thankfully, on macOS, you can disable the store in the Music app entirely. This will probably be removed at some point. When disabled, the only remnant is a small username in the bottom-left corner of the screen. I would love to see this gone as well, but local libraries are increasingly of no concern to Apple or the general public so I doubt they will fix this.
Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine. However, you have to question if that’s what most people who use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don’t necessarily have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad supported free music streaming services if they never pay for music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.
Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.
Android allows changing, and disabling, the default though. Last I checked, trying to open an MP3 will demand the Music app on an iPhone, and clicking an Apple Music link will do the same instead of allowing one to open a webpage
It's a general trend with hired managers who optimize for their bonuses. Also many founder led companies when they got sold to the shareholders are also optmizing for that. Some founder led companies are optimizing for something else, not profits only, but that's rare and that's what Jobs had the leeway to do when he got back to the almost bankrupt company. Current minions will try to squeeze more profit from any screen the incentives are such that they'd do that.
Enshitification is possible where there is some kind of lock-in and the pain of leaving is greater than the level of annoyance of the product. Apple has one of the strongest lock-in ecosystems and it's rational for them to do so.
I'm not sure there is a better way, because max freedom = open source, but that equals mostly subpar experience for the average user. Let's hope for more platforms and data transfer from one to the other.
I have to rant about search in the App Store.
Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted links but they're not as prominent.
The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite literally half the screen.
I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
> Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always* places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
> I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost less time to find out than writing this comment ;)
Consumers need actual choice too. Choosing between ad-infested music and no-music is crap. The option of music, sans PM-bloat doesn't exist.
Sub music with the thing you like.
Freaking heck, I've gotta dismiss ads on my BANKING APP just to deposit a check.
>> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26 they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music from iTunes Store.
An iPhone is a vending machine in your pocket.
(owned and operated by Apple, and __you__ paid for it.)
I disagree. You can disable all the apps—in fact never use _any_ app if you can avoid it altogether. Apps are inherently bad, and the web version is always better.
It didn’t have to be like this, but here we are.
I often go weeks without opening any app but the browser on my phone.
Good for you, but if you never buy from the vending machine that doesn't mean it's not a vending machine.
What do you mean "modern"? I'm using iPhones since 4S and I don't think that Music or iBooks workflow changed, it's largely the same. So probably Steve Jobs was OK with that.
Um, no? Apple Music wasn't even a thing in the iPhone 4S timeframe. You used to buy music in the iTunes Store, and play it in the music player app.
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.
> If I honestly thought Android would be any different
I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android. All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB) organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android tablet, phone and a generic cloud backup folder with SyncThing. I don't subscribe to any media service (and never have).
My music library/player is PowerAmp, my ebook reader is the open source KOReader and my podcast app is Podcast Addict. None of them has a store and they are all free (although I did upgrade to the plus version of PowerAmp to support the developer). They all get regular updates, are highly customizable and have every feature I want or can imagine wanting. My browser is Android Firefox with uBlock Origin so I don't see any ads and for YouTube I side-loaded Revanced Extended from the open F-Droid store, which is a clone of the YouTube app with no ads and all dark patterns removed. I also run a side-loaded open-source DNS-level ad blocker for the occasional social media app.
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 that still works great (I did replace the original battery last year which took ~20 mins). I'm using a five year old phone not because I'm cost conscious, I'd happily pay >$1,500 for a new phone and I keep looking at new models every year but never see anything that would be a noticeable improvement for my usage. Really... I swear I'm NOT trying to be @SimpleLife or minimalist/retro, I have a significant yearly budget for discretionary toys, but some years I struggle to spend it all because I'm also allergic to things that are constantly low-grade annoying or that I can't customize to my prefs. I just refuse to adopt anything that wants to own me instead of me owning it.
I haven’t used an android device in 2 years, but I was just like you for almost a decade. At some point I got tired of all the micro-annoyances that I had with android and my oneplus phones (my last one was the oneplus 7T), such as awful brightness sensor, terrible compass, suboptimal gps, and low quality vibration engine. All stuff that you’ll never hear about in an actual review, for some reason. My music player is an app called “Music”, and my ebook reader is an app called “Books”. I have spent exactly zero seconds looking for these apps since they’re already included with the phone, and are not developed by an unknown hero that could be hit by a bus at any moment. On books I read books that I bought from the iTunes Store, and epubs or pdfs that I downloaded online. I can access the epub files of both my own and the store-bought stuff from my mac’s filesystem. Everything is fully synced to all of my other devices through iCloud, a service which I’ve spent zero minutes setting up and zero minutes maintaining. These apps have all features I need, since all I want them to do is open my files and keep track of progress. They’re not customizable and I don’t care about it. I could download open source apps from the App Store or alt-store if I wanted to. I pay 3 euros/month for my cloud storage. It works and I haven’t had problems with it. I share it with some family members. My browser is safari with uBlock origin lite. Admittedly I had to spend some time looking for a decent ad blocker, it’s not as easy as android. I’m also not trying to live a minimalist or retro life, although I appreciate the ideology. My main philosophy right now is just that my phone is a tool through which I read books and listen to music (among other things). It has some limitations, but they’re not important. I don’t want to have to think about setting up a media server to listen to music, or figuring out syncthing settings once again because it’s been 3 years since I last set it up and it now broke all of a sudden. I just want to not have to think about this and get on to more important aspects of life.
I do it similar to you, except that I use PlexAmp for my music.
But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g., Spotify).
That said, though, at least we have this option. But is there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is available to them as well.
My understanding is that Firefox on iOS is substantially limited from Windows and Android. Like they can only run uBlock Origin Lite and many add-ons aren't available. Something about Apple policy blocking browser extensions that can run scripts/code, as it might compete with Apple's app store. But that's just what I've read online from other people. It also might be somewhat different recently in the EU, at least about the installing alt app stores. As I said, I haven't used an iOS device in over a decade, so have no first hand knowledge.
The Music app on iPhones went from simple and usable to an absolute dumpster fire pushing a subscription. Even with a subscription it's incredibly maddening because of the terrible UX and show-stopping bugs (Literally failing at playing music!).
The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26 since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own library.
The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
My favorite "bug" was when that dumb thing refused to play because I forgot to stop playing music on my Mac for whatever reason (sometimes the play was actually stopped, it was just unable to resolve state).
Spotify has other issues, but at least as a streaming player, it is smart enough to tell me when there is something playing somewhere else and it even allows me to keep playing while just switching the output.
If at least they had kept it as a good app to manage local music, but even that has regressed. Don't get me started on suboptimal use of space.
I have a hard time following the Apple advocates, it has become quite bad for the price you pay, there is really no other conclusion that is reasonable.
Apple's beancounters have figured out that they just have to be more polished than Microsoft and Google's environments, and despite the legitimate complaints you've made, they still are.
Precisely. This is their "Have the cake and eat it too" strategy, where so long as they aren't as egregious as their competitors, they know it's a Net gain as most of their customers will still feel the grass is still greener in their wall garden than elsewhere. Even if the grass isn't near as green or well kept so to speak as it used to be.
This is why you should always pirate digital media, even if you bought it.
A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.
I always pirate the media i buy and/or the physical books i buy.
Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can take… good notes on the pages).
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
VLC is your friend.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
> Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store
As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms. Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial.
My frustration with Apple when I tried it out was that you either use iTunes or there's little other choice. Technically some choice, yes, but because most people are passive and use the Apple stuff by default, there's a smaller community of developers who are motivated to try to compete.
When I see people criticize Notepad in Windows (for example) it feels irrelevant because you're not expected to use Notepad for anything but the most trivial use cases. There are so many other, better options, and the platform has a culture of exploring those options.
Microsoft used to have one of the best media players around! Windows used to have built in streaming support from device to device. You could load up music on your personal PC and play it on your home theater through your Xbox360! Windows Media Player was huge, only eclipsed by Winamp at the time.
Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)
They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn sucked all the air out of the room.
They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!
Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)
Microsoft had so many opportunities that they just failed to execute. How did they miss on everything?
Home servers
Media streaming
Smartphones
Touchscreens
Tablets
They even had media production with MSNBC.
All of this was available from Microsoft in the XP era. How did they fail at literally all of it? There has to be a lesson.
I call it the first mover disadvantage!
(I was there first hand to witness it again and again!)
Bill Gates is terrifyingly smart. He sees trends decades ahead. But knowing something is coming (smart TVs) does you no good without timing.
You build a first gen product, accrue mountains of legacy tech debt in the process (being first is hard! There is no one else to learn lessons from!) and then a competitor comes along and makes a V2 when the market is more ready and they can implement it better than you because they can learn from everything you did wrong (possibly also hiring half your team away).
Timing is equally important as product. Making a smart TV before widespread broadband adoption? Before streaming video had a flood of high quality content? Oops.
Real Player was doing streaming video in the 90s! Everyone knew it was the future, it was obviously the future! The future is now and the majority of video is streaming from a server somewhere!
Great idea, but ouch that timing. (That said, founders got rich anyway, and real video was a necessary step to where we are now!)
So what’s the lesson for future business leaders? Someone has to be first. What can a first mover do to get to that second generation product?
Apple is the often sung master of this.
Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets. Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience waiting for AR/VR.0
There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but way too early.
Sure but “be second” doesn’t help that first mover. What incentive is there to innovate if your product is doomed to fail? What can a company do to both innovate and develop a viable product?
Are the corporate structures and cultures necessary for this just that different?
First movers do sometimes win, Netflix, Uber, Amazon.
Also VCs have to invest their funds in something! :D
The key is matching innovation with timing. History is filled with great ideas done decades, or even a century, too early.
If Apple puts ads in its Maps, there will be an opening for a gorgeously-skinned OpenStreetMaps app. Possibly even with a $1/year WhatsApp-style subscription.
I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.
nose boops Kagi
Big ups for mentioning KAGI
I haven’t used Apple devices back when they were good so I have always avoided all the built-in Apple bloat/adware.
Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software.
It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.
As a Linux user, I feel like a different breed here: I'm pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from now will be pretty much the same, and I'm happy about that.
I recently dusted off a CentOS 5 file server that hadn’t been powered on in a decade. It’s familiar but a lot has changed.
But to your point it has changed less than Windows or MacOS.
> I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app
That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.
You are YASsing a ChatGPT authored screed…
Now where'd you cop that?
Disconcertingly many em dashes, but they're used correctly, without spaces, and are easy to type on MacOS.
Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here.
I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.
> "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill
I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.
Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc
If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained.
I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff.
Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products.
yeah, but that ship has sailed.
I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question.
That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.
So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.
About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed.
And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.
This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.
I've worked in consumer electronics, batteries are built in because reviewers will endlessly trash a product that is just 1mm thicker than anything apple puts out, and they fawn over apple because the products are so thin.
If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back problems".
A small exaggeration? Not by far, reviewers nasty about device thickness.
Then 70% of people shove a case on and it really doesn't matter.
There are good water ingress reasons for non-replaceable batteries, making a device water proof and have a replaceable battery does add a good deal of thickness.
Anyway, you can get a battery replaced at a phone shop for a reasonable rate anyway, so IMHO it isn't as big of a deal now days.
I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.
Worse still, if you’re too polite, many people won’t “get” the message.
“Oh, he just thinks my baby has interesting and unique features.”
> I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.
I agree in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum, we're talking about Steve Jobs. A dude who would semi-regularly send coworkers and subordinates out of rooms in tears, throw shit around the office, and in general make a complete ass of himself.
Like, I agree with you, it's gonna be hard to tell someone their baby is ugly. There's a better way to do it than throwing a stapler at the wall above their head and calling them ugly too.
I don't mean to pick on you in particular but we seriously need to shred this societal idea that visionaries, rockstar devs, auteurs, whatever, have to be anti-social fucking monsters to make whatever they happen to make. It's stupid and it sucks and it excuses tons of abusive behavior. I'm all for making great shit but if you have to hurt people to do it, then I don't think it's worth it at all.
I once worked for a leader who wanted to be like Jobs, complete with the black shirts.
So anyways, going into a design review I (UI dev lead) had warned early on that the new design was bad. I said it was going to be bad. Listed why it was going to be bad, and politely gave my feedback to UX, and I was ignored.
Walk into the review, it gets torn apart. It was really horrible. The GM looks over at me, asks for my take. I reply that I gave my feedback weeks ago and I hadn't approved of the design.
GM proceeds to lay into the UX team, swearing, yelling, and such, and basically asking why they hadn't listed to my initial feedback. It ended with an ultimatum that henceforth the design team was going to listen to me if I said no to a design before they wasted his time.
We were at the time outsourcing UX work to an obscenely expensive design firm who hasn't done software work before, just physical media. Some of the team was good, but a few of the designers were violently incompetent.
(A short time later we nixed the entire team, hired the good ones, and built our own,amazing, internal UX team.)
I'm not sure how I feel about the situation. It was nice to be vindicated, and rockstar personalities rarely listen to polite level feedback. "Fuck you don't bring me shitty designs and bill me tens of thousands of dollars for them when the fucking dev team can tell the design is shit" is kind of a legit response to people who just won't listen.
It does sour relationships though, and IMHO some of that relationship between me and the UX lead took years to rebuild.
> in tears
I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs… the names of three people that have built multi-trillion dollar companies!
Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.
Being nice just doesn’t work as well.
It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply, it’s actually opposite-is-better because it sounds more nice when you don’t say how things really are.
It’s fun to watch from the outside as people try to futilely fight against human nature.
PS: Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos aren’t the nicest people in the world either, I just haven’t heard any stories of them making people cry.
> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
Those getting married to the jock never said they just want a sensitive guy. Some value big muscles more than others, but certainly not the majority.
> I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs…
Is this supposed to be a positive point? Gates has exploited numerous legal maneuvers to create yes, a gigantic software company, and one of the absolute largest blights on tech as an industry. Name a Microsoft product that doesn't suck ass. Elon Musk hasn't done a fucking thing, he got lucky with PayPal, bought and booted the founders of Tesla, and has been coasting on it ever since. And since he fired his PR team his public image has gone to shit and all of his companies, save Space X and only because of generous Government contracts, are going down the drain.
> Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.
No, being an asshole is what one can get away with once one has struck it rich in tech. For all the shit talking I would do about Jobs, and do it I will, he is the only one on this list who did it in the direction you're talking about, where he was the asshole first, who THEN built a ridiculously successful business. Gates was a nepo baby who got access to computers at an incredibly young age when that was borderline unheard of. Musk would've never left his mothers basement if not for his father's wealth.
> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
Ah, you're also in your mother's basement I see.
> There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply
We haven't been meaningfully part of evolution, survival of the fittest, since the first of our ancestors picked up a rock and tied it to a stick, and leapt to the top of the foodchain. We are by virtue of social networking and tool usage, apex predators. Nothing has been a threat to us in the "nature" way for thousands of years and nobody thinks otherwise apart from weird alpha-male guys who follow incredibly shit nature "science" to justify their unhinged anti-social behavior.
Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.
But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.
Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials), and then steve just told everyone they were holding their phones wrong.
Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.
I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact.
His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.
Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.
The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
The magic of Jobs is/was he truly was a self-starter and self-taught man; he had the rare mix of traits necessary to be a visionary.
Frankly I think Jobs saw Cook as a key operator to ensure the firms future survival and future growth; I'd imagine Jobs foresaw the tremendous impact the smartphone would have and all Cook had to do was be a shrewd operator as Apple had built such a huge advantage over competitors by the time he was dead.
He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul of the company, if there is such a thing.
Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.
Correct. This is something that is becoming increasingly apparent with time.
Ads in the App Store continue to be a bad customer experience as well.
Anything you search for, the first thing at the top of the list is an ad from a competitor!
> I think Steve would have changed with the times too
That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.
Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases.
(But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)
Of course we don’t know. But regarding this specific example, bear in mind that Apple is in vastly better shape as a business than it was in 1999. So if that argument didn’t work on him then, it doesn’t seem implausible that it wouldn’t work now.
Or the opposite. The Apple might and/or its execs might think that they are in such a dominant position that purposefully lowering UX to extract a few extra pennies from their users won't cause any short term harm.
While back in the 90s the brand/reputational damage might have destroyed them.
Back in the 90s, Apple had zero brand or reputation. It had a few die-hard Mac fans and a bunch of inherited deals with public school district purchasing departments from when the Apple II dominated. They licensed Mac OS to clone manufacturers like Microsoft did with Windows. They were essentially already destroyed and waiting for the eviction notice.
Jobs, with Mac OS X and the iMac, absolutely created the unassailable perception of quality and user experience Apple is known for today. The term "reality distortion field" was used a lot in relation to how much Jobs sold Apple and the Mac in keynotes.
So it's completely fair to use his well-known positions against the company's current practices.
Yes, exactly. They couldn't afford to crapify their products for short term again and hope to survive. They wouldn't be here if they did that. Now they can.
> well-known positions against the company's current practices
Companies generally don't really have values besides maximizing profits. People working or leading them might. But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at most.
> decide it's necessary for the business
Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable.
Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.
> Necessary?
Necessary, beneficial, has more upside than downside, whatever way you want to slice it.
> Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares
I feel like this is actually support for my argument that people change over time (either naturally, or to adapt to the times themselves changing): I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
> I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
Agree, but personally I don't respect Cook and agree he seems to have sold his spine sometime around when he sold his soul. I got the sense that Jobs wasn't drifting toward increased greed but rather, a knowledge that he and Apple both had more than enough "F-you money" -- to do what they thought was best for the product, knowing that that was also exactly aligned with the long-term interests of the company anyway.
Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it.
Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.
>I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product.
It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.
The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope they abstain. But it’s really not too offensive in my opinion.
> fairly tame by modern standards
That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.
I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point.
If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.
This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.
There are lots of good experiences from ads in maps:
- I search for "restaurants" and someone is having a special
- A trampoline park opens near me, I'd like it to catch my eye
- I've been googling chocolates recently, so populate the map with chocolate shops
- Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway
> Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway
I'm glad there are always ads available to stop my mind from wandering.
genuinely the worst opinion I’ve seen on HackerNews
there are such better ways to enable these experiences without introducing the zero-sum, scam-inducing, corporate fuckery game that making it a pay-to-win ad-driven experience gives you
I’m also concerned that boredom makes you want to see ads
That sounds absolutely awful, honestly. I wouldn't want to see any of those things mess with the "natural" order of search results for whatever I've explicitly searched for.
I don’t want my phone to consume any of my “free” attention, ever, but holy cow especially not while driving.
> as a car passenger
Sometimes the driver looks at the map screen too. That's most of the reason it's there.
The 1st and 3rd are better served by Apple choosing the best result rather than who's paid for an ad.
I do agree with you in theory, though their 'attempts' at this kind of thing are comical if not absurd (witness the organic search results in the App Store).
I want to challenge the idea that any of these is an unqualified "good experience". I desire none of this.
Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot on growing revenue from services. Which is kind of sad because they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad:
- just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.
- make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.
As for services they could go other way:
- be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or charge end user more with subscription.
- make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
[0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
This is easily disapproved by just looking at their charts. Especially if you remove the Covid bump.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/apples-fiscal-2025-in-cha...
And even a little bit of analysis will show none of your ideas will grow the bottom line.
your chart shows total revenue but not per category but even so it shows the last 4 years revenue didn't grow that much as before and its mostly growing because grow in services revenue.
The last chart
https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2...
you can see in your linked chart that everything is pretty much flat except services in the last 4 years. iPhone revenue in 2022: 205B, then next to years down (201B) and in 2025: 210B.
Where is the analysis?
A cheaper Mac Mini? $599 for the entry level is a pretty great deal (assuming you view macOS and the ecosystem as a feature and not a bug).
Genuine question: is there a comparable Windows machine in a mini desktop form factor at a similar or lower price?
They don't put MacOS on iPad because they want MacOS to slowly die and make App Store the only way to install software. This has nothing to do with cannibalizing Mac.
It is worrying that the machines many of HN rely on are the minority of their revenue so they'd not even flinch financially to mess up that product line. TF for Linux/x86/arm as an alternative ecosystem that is not controlled by one party.
You might be right, but if MacOS dies, how will Apple develop for iOS etc?
And app developers too. Maybe sister comment about something cloud. Can fleece devs for more money too, bonus!
probably some subscription cloud environments
probably some sort of "ai" app builder interface. They've always flirted with the layperson programming with their languages like hypertalk. I wouldn't be surprised if they figure out a way to achieve even greater lock-in capture
by saturated i think you mean saturated the market. i would argue that almost every person that is their target has in iPhone.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/09/teen-iphone-ownership-c...
> They focus now a lot on growing revenue
Explain like I'm five, how does a multi trillion dollar company expect to keep growing revenue forever? Are they planning to keep enshittifying user experience until revenue dives?
No one knows, they are just trying to kick the can as far as they can and escape the inevitable coming back to Eartb of the stock price. P/E is currently 36. Everything plateaus. The human population is plateauing. The SP500 is now 2 standard deviations from the mean and that’s as far as it has ever gone.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
you omitted the most important 2 words from my quote: "growing revenue from services". If you read other part of my post I shared ideas how they could grow revenue without enshitification.
After that saturate they can keep innovating like xiaomi - they build plenty of useful home products so apple can as well.
Maybe they should stop focussing on 'growing'. Isn't nearly $100bn in profit per year enough??
Timmy is too worried about the goddamn stock price for that. They could easily just transition to a company that isn’t promising stupid growth every quarter and just pays fat dividends on a portion of the profits.
The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager, everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, there are major CTAs that are essentially "black on black" and practically not visible below 50% screen brightness and not acceptably visible at max brightness. Just last night I noticed the browser tabs will render full color content behind the text. It's so bad I've been considering cataloging screenshots and writing about it, because some of it's laughably bad.
> The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.
The iPhone 5 was revealed a year after Jobs stepped down as CEO and his death shortly after. The design was almost surely locked in while he was still CEO.
The original iPhone had a 2-toned back too.
I spent a few hours trying to debug some fixed position issues with my JS/CSS code recently.Found out that iOS Safari fundamentally broke fixed positioning. How do you break `position: fixed`?
Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.
I have no doubt that the team behind Liquid Glass had the same noble motivations as the team behind Microsoft's Metro Design Language in 2010.
In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!
But there's a matter of taste as well as novelty. And while there were many incredible things about Metro, history bears witness to how much Zune and Windows Phone and Windows 8 have become beloved household names in the decade-and-a-half since.
I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
> I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
Agree. Jobs took big swings like Liquid Glass but, perhaps the most important part that’s missing in present Apple, he was obsessive about ensuring the swings were executed to a high standard. He was hands on in this pursuit.
It’s actually weird to me that a company so large, so well compensated, so profitable, so prolific, etc can’t seem to care enough about the details without a Jobs-esque foot on their neck type leader to be afraid of.
Without a Jobs-esque foot, the bozos have nothing to fear. They flourish and spread, gain power by impressing other bozos, and push out anyone with half a brain.
MobileMe’s devs were brought into an auditorium for a dressing down that included the lines “you should all hate each other for letting each other down” and in response to “what is MobileMe supposed to do” got a “Why the fuck doesn’t it do that”
The smug dopes that are left over in the design department are probably clapping each other in the back over shipping liquid glass. Tim doesn’t give a shit about how ugly, troublesome, and problematic it is. Stock price go up, whatever!
I don't think Metro died because it was bad as a matter of taste. Quite the opposite actually, I wasn't a huge fan of its aesthetics but I was surprised by how many people liked it.
No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself - it was actually very good in that department, arguably still the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the devices ended up being very limited overall because there were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).
Iphone user here. I have to admit that the IOS UI/UX has become really tiring and at times I'm utterly confused by inconsistency, a total contrast from the early days IOS when everything was consistent and intuitive. The silver lining is that I am using my Iphone less and less.
I am running the latest iOS 26.1 and it's still very buggy. The most annoying one is that anytime I either restart my phone or update the phone (which restarts it), the wallpaper changes to all black.
That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen icons didn't look so ugly with black background.
I ran a reverse image search on the image of Steve Jobs, and couldn't come up with anything, so it does appear that it might be AI generated, which I don't approve of.
Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous person doing something he never did.
it's super distasteful, i thought, having seen steve jobs in person face to face
Honestly, there should be laws against gen AI models creating fake media with real individuals. We're going to end up with a massive mess on our hands once the video starts looking more realistic
It sure looks it. It was my assumption the moment I saw it.
Same here, ironic since the article is about crossing lines.
This author is a man who worked closely with Steve Jobs, and the photo was obviously AI generated, so I think this gives him leeway to do such a thing.
It isn't obvious to you that it's AI? You had to look it up? Please get more familiar with actual photographs, maybe skim a few AI free photo sites or, oh, I don't know, buy a few coffee table photo books and develop some discernment, because that one is about as obvious a fake photo as a stick figure would be. It's truly gross.
Right? I only generated a single AI picture of myself and it had that exact shading seen in this picture. Extremely obvious.
I'm glad he tried to look it up. But we shouldn't have to, all AI generated images/videos should be watermarked full stop.
Who cares? He’s dead. I know that sounds harsh but this obsession and worship of founders has to stop. Companies are people or so says the Supreme Court. So now that the company exists it’s bigger than any one person even the founder.
The company he built is now an order of magnitude more valuable and hardware is the best it’s ever been.
It’s maturing. No company stays nimble and vibrant and agile forever. It’s paying a dividend for Pete’s sake.
All these callbacks to oh no apple under Steve never would have done this … yeah well it’s 2025 and he unfortunately got cancer and died from it. Apple as a company lives on and new leadership should be free to take it in any direction they seem justified.
Yea i also think this blind steve worship needs to stop. He was great back then but who knows what he would have done nowaday.
The situation is different, the world is different, apple is serving much more consumers, the company has much more employees, more products, more markets.
And i get it, the software they put out nowadays is pretty terrible and could be much better and everyone is frustrated but this constant steve ressurrection needs to stop.
To be fair — and I love my Mac — macOS isn’t as snappy as Linux in my experience. And yet I still rock macOS because it just works and slow app load times are just a small price to pay for things just working. YMMV of course.
Hi Tim Cook
Is that AI Steve Jobs in the header image? Pretty uncanny and takes away from the article.
Yeah especially since it probably wouldn't take long to scrub through some WWDC presentations of his to find him holding up his hands like that (or a gesture of comparable meaning)
There's something way off about that image, I'd bet money it's AI. Gross.
It's death porn gross AI slop, 100% and immediately obvious to anyone who isn't coming of age in the slop era.
> death porn gross AI slop
Once again in English, please.
Yes. Pretty hypocritical for an article about "crossing red lines" to use AI slop for an image of a real person. Very disrespectful.
it also just looks awful and only about 80% like the guy
It's not hypocritical for an article about crossing someone else's red line to simultaneously be crossing your red line.
Depicting deceased people with AI is objectively distasteful, especially from a self-described "ad guy" who should know better.
That’s not what “objectively” means.
They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search. For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple? (Now the first result for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok is at least the correct first party ad, though this almost seems like extortion on the part of Apple.)
(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)
My mother fell for exactly this. Downloaded a ChatGPT clone and paid for it. She was quite upset with herself when I had to tell her.
Until now I blamed Google, but now it seems much more likely that it was Apple’s fault.
Standards sure have dropped. I saw a new iPad mini in store, on display, and it simply couldn’t run the home screen without stuttering and visible frame rate drops! At least in my mind, this seems like a transgression from Apple’s former standards and that’s before the accessibility and visual challenges new iOS has.
I don’t care about whatever Jobs thought, but honestly I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better.
Their hardware is still amazing, but I’ve had enough issues with software quality and Cook’s penny pinching philosophy that I’ve bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux.
So far, the experience is making me question whether my next main driver will be a MacBook.
Yep. For the first time I'm really considering Linux as a personal / desktop OS. Currently I just use it for servers. But now for the first time I don't think I have much to lose by leaving the Apple ecosystem.
Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings app became an upsell app. I'm sorry I came here to change a setting not dismiss a notification on your latest failed service thing that requires 20,- a month.
It’s the push for services.
It’s the product ladder with artificial limitations like low fps screens or small storage to push you a bit more.
It’s bugs piling up because Marketing needs the next buzzword released.
It’s the aesthetics optimized for a screenshot rather than real usability.
It’s the feeling that their top talent is not able to deliver anymore, like their camera’s processing or AI features.
> It’s the product ladder with artificial limitations like low fps screens
This one really pisses me off as someone who just had to upgrade their 2018 iPad Pro. The air would've been great, if it had a 120hz screen. I really don't need any other "pro" feature but I refused to tolerate 60hz in 2025 when every other device I own including my big desktop monitor is 120hz or more. But no, I have to spend an extra $500 for a higher refresh rate. I didn't even want the pro, I want a 120hz air so I can get the colors I want.
Nonetheless, because my screen was broken and I needed a new iPad, I forked over the money for the pro. Conveniently, they use two different magic keyboards so now that I'm "locked in" to the pro ecosystem, I'm forever stuck buying iPad pros unless I also want to have to buy a new magic keyboard that works with the Air line if they ever release a 120hz air.
Apple can easily differentiate the air from the pro in numerous other ways besides refresh rate, and yet they still continue to ship 60hz screens.
Yep. I have two un-dismissable notifications in the Settings app for two different AppleCare products. Can't dismiss them - you just have to have a red notification icon until they expire. Just turn off badges for the Settings app right? Sorry, the Settings app is mysteriously missing from the Notifications options.
>> Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings app became an upsell app.
I didn't really notice this until I setup an iPhone from scratch for someone. I normally just move from one to the other. The nagging from Settings is outrageous. It will never stop telling you to setup Apple Pay and Siri and offering Apple Care. It was like the experience of buying a PC in the 2000's.
They don't actually have to be good. They just need to be better than viable alternatives.
> I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better.
Why would they care if they can just lock the gates and put some barbed wire on top of the walls? What are you going to do, move to Android?
>What are you going to do, move to Android?
Why not? If ads are coming anyway why pay the apple tax.
But Blue Bubbles! And iMessage, and you will need to move your photos. Also Music, movies and other stuff.
iMessage is only popular in US, I rarely seen someone using it in europe or asia. For movies and music people have spotify and netflix these days. There is only small hassle for non-tech savvy to move photos.
What's with this uncanny AI Steve Jobs photo? I hope blog writers have red lines too.
The sentiment of this article seems to be praising Jobs as a protector of user experience. And the author doesn't have the decency to use his real face?
I will never understand why some companies turn away from some of the core principles that got them to their position.
If it’s market pressure, it tells me that Cook doesn’t really believe their future roadmap is good enough for growth, so he needs to hedge with other things that make the product worse. Of course those very things will hurt future growth. That’s how an upward spiral turns downward.
I feel this strongly. From a business perspective, when your competitors expand their revenue avenues through ads you have three options: copy them to catch up, do nothing and perish, or lobby the government for increased consumer protections. The third option isn't being taken, but I believe its the right one for many companies that want to remain customer-centric, and that have real values.
The people who helped them reach that position are probably retired, so the new leadership wants to make more money and leave their own mark.
I have a lot of problems with people like this. Not all marks are worth making. Change for the sake of change or ego is almost always bad.
If someone hands me a golden goose I’m not going to enter it in a cock fight. I’d be wise to continue with the golden egg strategy.
I agree but the people who want to climb the corporate ladder usually want to leave their own mark.
the thing that you're missing here is that Cook is gonna get roasted if he doesn't take every opportunity to maximize growth. That means the future roadmap as written PLUS ads in maps and other decisions like that. There's no such thing as enough.
Not having ads was the thing that separated Apple from Google. Apple was winning by selling hardware with software that didn’t need ads to support the business model. Ads just feel greedy, especially when they are still charging a premium price on many things. How tolerant will people be of high prices when the resulting product feels cheap? This is a race to the bottom, which was a race Jobs was unwilling to compete in.
I am checking this carefully. The red line is here, for me and I think for many Apple customers. I choose Apple for being different from other companies, for valuing customer experiences and for rejecting ads and other "insults" for users. I think that if they cross the line, me and many other customers will leave.
> I choose Apple for being different from other companies, for valuing customer experiences and for rejecting ads and other "insults" for users
Yes. The point of willingly putting yourself in the walled garden was that the experience was definitively better than the other options.
When the walled garden ceases to be better and starts adopting all the same dark patterns and user hostile experience as everyone else, what point is there in staying inside?
The hardware is still marginally better but the experience is no longer better. In fact with android at least you can sideload and install full powered ad blockers. At some point once the iOS experience degrades beyond a certain threshold, android will be a more attractive option.
From the perspective of a casual user, on Android you get mobile Chrome which doesn't do extensions at all, while on iOS mobile Safari has extensions including ad blockers.
Where will you go? The alternatives seem worse in almost every way.
> and I think for many Apple customers
Unfortunately, I think people who care about this enough to leave are a rounding error. It’s why the entire consumer product market looks the way it does.
I don't understand why car-based things can have ads or updates that popup or things like that. My car (2024 Subaru) + Android Auto is so restrictive that I can't even type a search query into the screen while I'm parked, I have to speak to it. Yet, while I was out grocery shopping the other day the thing popped up multiple times asking me if I wanted to start an update "That would require you to turn your car off for 5-10 minutes"
It popped up a second time as I SLOWED DOWN at a red light. I didn't even come to a complete stop but apparently that was "stopped" enough for it to pop up.
Not to mention while you're using Google Maps the whole time it's popping up asking "Is that cop still there? Is there still construction?" and they're looking for you to click on a button on the car's screen that indicates yes/no. However, when I'm parked at a rest area trying to look for the nearest cracker barrel it'll start navigating me automatically to one that's 45min in the wrong direction instead of just letting me pick which one I want to go to.
And now, ads will show in Apple Maps? Ah yeah, when I'm driving is definitely the best time to distract me for your own greed!
It's asinine. Obviously the "Safety features" are just performative. Probably so they can force us to have a mic enabled or something. It's bs.
Whoever designs these should be fired and never allowed in this space again.
They will always put ads into everything. Doesn't matter what they say, eventually someone's gonna show up and notice that money is being left on the table by not advertising to all those users. Paying them just makes your attention even more valuable.
The trouble with any ad-free tier is that anybody who can’t afford the ad-free tier can’t afford what is being advertised.
There is some amusing "leopards ate my face" logic in paying a company to not pester you for further monetization.
Never pay them. You're essentially paying to segment yourself into the upper echelons of the market.
I probably sound like a broken record, but the death of Apple won't come from being behind on AI, from losing developer support, from bad products or services. Fundamentally, it'll be because it is optimising for being on the stock market and chasing endless revenue growth.
All other issues I've outlined is a symptom of that fundamental issue. Apple is losing its soul.
The author suggests Steve would have done something based on what Steve did in the past in that particular set of circumstances. But it's not fair to suggest what Steve would have done today, given where Apple is now. Would Steve have said "screw it" to the share price and just ran the company with the same ethos? Maybe, he was bold like that. But then he also had a Board to answer to.
I will never understand why "make good things and maintain customer loyalty" is not even remotely considered as a viable strategy to "make money"
If you sell people things they want and you treat them well they keep buying from you instead of tolerating you until they stop buying from you.
Capitalism is so fucked
I don't use my phone much other than you know, for calling and occasional messaging. For me the most annoying is constant asking of password in both phone and mac. It's so secure.
> and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience.
"brutally" is the only factual part, otherwise he harmed the experience plenty, often for the sake of appearances
Goggle also had a memo on how ads were bad and rejected the idea ... until they didn't, with the same founders, so you don't need much of a leadership change for the strong incentive of ad money to dilute the resolve.
I thought Jobs' red lines went out of the window as far back as the Apple Pencil (iPhone presentation 2007: "Stylus? Yuck!").
I don't think apple executives understand what made apple so successful.
Or maybe I'm out of touch ? I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
But to me, i buy apple because this a premium device that is well thought out and doesn't make me waste time on advertisement, dark pattern and other bullshit i don't have the time nor the will to care about.
I ditched windows for macos after the candy crush saga in start menu and just the overall philosophy of windows 10. For instance, not being able to decide if I want to update and when.
I ditched Android because Google made me loose so much time with their ad riddled services, and their app professionalism is abysmal. It constantly change, no user interface is the same,...
For all these reasons I bought expensive apple devices and I tolerated the many bugs, often having to restart my iphone once every day.
Now if you're going to monetize me just as the other and make me waste my time fiddling around on apple maps checking if one thing is an ad or something I actually want to see, I'll just buy the cheapest thing I can get.
There is no reason to pay premium for the same quality.
But that's just me, maybe they know something I don't. Brand fidelity, especially in the USA is strong, people don't want to be that guy who has an Android ? iPhone are status symbols in China ?
Very ironic but so much of tech ultimately comes down to taste and Tim Cook obviously just doesn't have it.
Much of life does frankly...
I think you can point to the actual day Apple started this decline they're still on: September 16 2015. That was the day Apple News was released, which I think as a product perfectly encapsulates near-everything wrong with Apple in one convenient package.
Could be wrong, but the photo of Steve Jobs at the top of the article looks AI. Disturbing suspicion.
Yea the sizing seems wrong. Hands are way too big compared to his head. Could be a weird lens/angle though.
If it is AI wtf is it even doing there though? It adds nothing. A quick search returns a bunch of images where Jobs looks annoyed or trying to stop something.
> Some time ago (1999-ish) [...] a number of ways to integrate ads were discussed.
> One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. [...]
This sounds so weird in 2025. However, I can see that probably in those times there was no "norm", and people were trying different things.
Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup might be the norm. And who knows how many similar things we dodged because of people like Jobs.
Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the ad-supported tier for a very long time now.
These days, we have moved to far more insane schemes. E.g. smart TV manufacturers are patenting detection of static frames to show you ads while TV is idle (although I don't think anyone has actually shipped that yet).
> Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the ad-supported tier for a very long time now.
Wow, this is wild. I've also remembered that Viber puts ads among your chats in a chats list. It shocked me first time I've seen that.
> patenting
As I understand, big companies are making lots of patents, and most of those never come to life.
> Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup might be the norm
Are there video ads at startup on Windows? On Android?
To me the really question is how that impacts my privacy. I’m okay with Ads in their software as long as it doesn’t negatively impact my privacy.
It’s obvious that many of google services have huge negative impacts on my privacy, which is why I buy from apple.
I buy from Apple for privacy and the their respecting users and being "classier" by not putting ads in their apps. That is the reason I pay the "Apple tax". I think this is very unfortunate.
It's very likely that the "privacy" advertising is largely a sham too. As Senator Wyden proved, Apple can be compelled by the federal government to conceal spyware in iOS and its supporting systems: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Hardly surprising given how they reneged their stance on in-OS advertising though.
This 'red line' was quite apparent around 10.14 when macOS and iOS were set on the collision course we see today in Ta-hoe. So much wasted visual space in the last 5 releases, making room for touch.
I doubt we'll see a pseudo macOS mode on mobileOS, but the mirroring for iOS in the last 2 major releases of macOS is just a jump to the left of local emulation.
Yep. Information density and compact but efficient UIs were definitely an advantage of macOS. Now they are on track to emulate the big buttons of Windows so what's the point ?
Tim Apple is a money grubbing robot with zero taste. Absolutely the bean counter type that Steve used to rail against.
He makes IBM look cool in conparison.
To be fair, ads on a map aren't the same as Windows 11 start menu ads – the former are useful and contextual.
I feel the story being told would be more equivalent to what Microsoft is doing rather than Google.
That said, advertising is like a virus, and every company and product is eventually infected by it. It's too tempting to not monetize your customer's eyeballs once you have enough of them.
I actually consider the windows start menu ads less objectionable. At least you can turn them off (for now). There is no way to disable ads embedded in the maps app. And it’s only useful and contextual if you’re using the map to look for somewhere to spend money. I rarely do this. I’m using it to check traffic, get directions to somewhere, or exploring out of geographical curiosity. In all of these use cases, ads are an unwanted distraction.
I think they’re trying to replace the hole they expect when the app stores are forced to be open. It is sad they lack any plan other than ads, it’s a complete lack of imagination from what is supposed to the one of the most innovative companies on earth. I feel this is a more worrisome signal than anything.
I haven't had an iPhone in 15 years, but have been considering going back for my next phone as mine is over 5 years old. I had no idea it had gotten this bad though. What a pile of garbage. Ads in the map app?
Whenever someone says, "oh Steve Jobs would have done / would never have done X", I always remember the scene in Silicon Valley where Laurie says "Monica, Peter Gregory is dead"[1].
Steve Jobs has been gone for a long time. Other people have taken his place, and Apple has been very successful since. While Jobs might have been very successful in his vision, a lot of things have changed since then, and it's very reasonable that the current apple execs might not align with what his philosophy was at the time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2-rGVw44A
Cool, if they ever fix the broken external monitor support, then I can see the ads on my second monitor too!!
I don't know... ads in maps is very, very different from ads in the OS.
Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments. Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment.
Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to expect it for free, with basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it. I suspect that most users think that ads are a better user experience than not using it at all because they won't pay $9.99/month for maps.
Maps is also a search engine, and ads are the primary way to fund search engines. I guarantee that if Apple every launches iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
I just hope they won't change Calculator as a service app.
Eventually it could get there if that's the direction Apple stays on.
> basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it.
> iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
See, I disagree with your entire premise here. Apple, unlike Google, has a very very profitable hardware business which provides so much to the bottom line that they don't have to operate Apple Maps or Apple Search or Calculator as a self-sustaining business with its own P&L. It's stupid to operate as though they must.
The correct thinking (in my not so humble opinion) for a long-term-minded company is to recognize:
1. That massive firehose of money allows them to make Maps markedly better than what Google can afford to do. Since Apple gave up on UI/UX design excellence, this ability to not rely on ads is arguably their only remaining differentiated advantage.
2. Part of what allows Apple to command such monster-sized margins is that (usually... so far... outside of the App Stores at least) their product is not packed full of sleazy ads that significantly detract from the experience. You don't just get to fully enshittify the product and still command the same high prices as you did when you were offering a premium product. A Porsche covered in wraps advertising porn sites and penis pills, which plays loud AI-generated ads on every screen all day long would not sell at the price a normal one does.
> You don't just get to fully enshittify the product and still command the same high prices as you did when you were offering a premium product
"Challenge accepted" - Tim Apple.
I'd pay $10/m for ad-free Apple/Google maps.
Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.
I don't understand why people are so tolerant of this first-party advertising.
We develop for iOS, so we need to register a bunch of Apple test accounts once in a while. Every time an account is registered, you get around 5 emails of ads. WITHOUT ANY UNSUBSCRIBE links.
Steve Jobs created iAd
Ads should be illegal.
Apple has already cross a red line, it stepped over to one that has little interest in user experience. Recent releases of MacOS and iOS and iPadOS have given rise to Windowsesque complexity and ugliness. I have used Macs since the Classic, and am sad to say I no longer ascribe to the cult of Apple.
There have been ads in Apple News for years now. There were not, at its outset.
And I hate them.
Yes. Steve would take a giant dump all over this nonsense.
Apple is increasingly at risk of similar enshittification as Google.
Local businesses with better quality usually have better ratings in maps and better economics—higher margins, repeat customers, lower acquisition costs. And since only nearby places can compete, you get real competition on merit instead of a race to the bottom with faceless actors. Good ads solve a real problem: helping people discover great spots in unfamiliar cities.
Jobs saw something with iAd.
The problem is simple auction mechanics favor whoever has the deepest pockets. A mediocre chain with fat margins outbids an amazing local place, even if the local spot delivers way more value. You’re optimizing for who can pay, not who’s actually good.
To fix this, you weight bids by quality signals like ratings, time spent and repeat visits.
Now ads amplify what’s already great instead of just selling visibility.
Users get better recommendations, good businesses win, and Apple builds trust. That’s how you turn ads from a tax on attention into actual product value—and an improved user experience.
Or, you could just use quality signals like ratings, time spent and repeat visits and not weight by the bids. All the upside, none of the downside.
I'm actually an apple convert, and I'm going back with my next new laptop purchase. About 8 years ago I got my first macbook at my first tech job and really loved what I was able to do with it as, essentially, a really fancy linux UI. Now it's a bloated linux UI that disrupts my ability to get work done, so I'm switching to a machine and OS that respect me.
If I see ads in their proprietary software, I’m done as a customer.
Uhm, have you opened your Settings app? It's had Apple ads for years. And the Wallet app showed a promo notification for the F1 movie.
I see no ads there
Decent short article built around a personal anecdote with SJ. The AI slop image of SJ at the top was such a turn off it was hard for me to respect anything this fellow had to say. It's a real shame that people feel the need to include images like that, presumably to draw attention on social media embeds, but it's just gross seeing death porn like that.
Apple Maps has always had subtle ads. They show various stores and shops at different zoom levels in your town, some requiring very high zoom levels meaning you wouldn’t stumble across them.
One word: Enshittification.
>It didn’t matter that customers would be free to choose a version with or without ads. He didn’t want any user to see the OS polluted in this way.
Another subtle but distinct user experience cost of this would be that every user is given the option to choose between one option or the other, and that is already part of the user experience, and it has a cost.
It's similar to the idea that more options are not better, you can't just keep adding more settings and levers and pulleys knobs on the task bar and the settings and the profile and the customization tab and the control panel, and the privacy center, etc...
Each choice has a UX cost. Even if it's technically outside of the software and it occurs at the shop. The product line is the first part of the experience, will you choose a product? a product XL? A product XL Pro?
Everything breaks.
Jobs, if lived, will bow to ads or get fired.
> What would Steve Jobs do?
> ... I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily similar “opportunity.” ... 1999-ish ... Lee Clow and I were invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac system software. ...
Not that I like ads, but - Late 90's Apple, fresh out of a near-death experience, is an extremely different context from today's Apple, with it's 12-digit annual profits and #4 spot on the Fortune 500 list.
Speaking simply to your comment because I'm not aware enough of their behaviors myself, wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a high Fortune 500 listing potentially be enough to make Steve say "We have enough honestly" obviously that's not the norm, most companies just seem to find any way to extract every ounce of our souls but I thought that was where Apple was supposed to differ, at least under Steve.
I honestly don't know this is just a question.
My thinking was that recently-near-death 1999 Apple, with no deep moats nor cash cows, needed to present itself as premium and squeaky-clean.
> ... wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a high Fortune 500 listing potentially be enough to make Steve say "We have enough honestly" ...
It'd be nice to imagine. But given Steve's documented horrible behaviors at a number of points in his life...I sadly doubt it.
Uhm, is crossing?? Mate, you're going to have to reverse direction and travel back about eight years to find that line.
I feel like most of this is Microsoft's fault. As MS lowers the bar for what's acceptable on Windows, Apple just has to be somewhat-obviously better.
Additionally, Google's ad-driven economy set a low bar with Android, but that platform has always been that way. Together, those platforms make it really easy for Apple to posture as being considerate.
Am I the only one that remembers Steve introducing the iAd platform?
Click bait headline. Is that a real photo of SJ? Flagged and moving on.
It doesn't matter what Steve Jobs would or wouldn't do, Tim Cook took Apple to a $3T company and that's where we are.
Money isn't everything. We can, and should, shun businessmen who try to eke out every ounce of profit by making their products terrible.
Yeah every action a company takes is immediately and completely reflected in the market cap /s
Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.
I dunno, for a while it was the most valuable company on the planet. While you might not like his judgment it seems plenty of people did.
So you approve of ads then since it makes the company more valuable?
Use an MP3 player from before the iPod existed and then try an iPod classic. Same with smart phones. There is no way you're going to convince most people that what you say is true in any general sense.
Sure, simplification means having to have some opinionated ways of doing things because you're removing options, but there's a very real benefit that can come out of it.
If anything, it makes the current state of Apple that much more sad.
I had an MP3 player before the iPod. It was a CD-based player, and it was pretty good.
I think, iPod was really one of the first users of 1.8" hard drives, so it was better than the competition simply because Apple had access to better hardware.
I disagree. Apple had no monopoly on 1.8" hard drives nor most of the other components in the original iPod (except maybe the scroll wheel itself?); they were merely among the first to apply it into a media player. It was the UI that was groundbreaking. You could switch from an album, to and artist, to a playlist, to a specific song all within seconds with your thumb. CD-based mp3 players were ok, but were battery hogs and updating playlists/music/etc was a hassle as one had to burn CDs. The UIs for most were "useable" at best.
Apple did have clever, original, and good marketing, but the product (iPod) was so clearly better than anything that came before it, either way. And that was my original point against the prior comment that the customer experience was just "be like Steve Jobs" and then it's good.
The first Apple iPods only had FireWire which was exotic here, so they were not at all popular. I had a Rio (Nitrus, I think?) that was released within a year from iPod's release. When I first interacted with an iPod a couple of years later, I was not at all impressed.
I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on point. Its marketing was great, however.
This might be the worst take I've ever read on this website.
I'm a lifetime Mac user who has bought exactly one iPhone (the 3G S) before switching to Android. I'm definitely not in the Jobs reality distortion field.
But I do remember how the iPod was better than every similar thing at the time, and how people spent _years_ clamoring for Apple to harness that same focus to make a phone. Apple had to go out and buy the iPhone name because that's what it had been colloquially called for years before it was announced.
There are plenty of things Apple has done wrong, many by Steve personally, but you can't seriously claim that his taste was only applicable to him.
Don't denigrate the meaning of the word "abuse" to make your hot take spicier.
as someone who bought the creativelabs mp3 player back in the day, the ipod was absolutely better and I was just being some combination of cheap and contrarian
I had a Zen Stone, which was made by... Creative!
It was much, much better than an iPod. I had an iPod first. I gave it away, because it was too heavy to carry around.
The Zen Stone was essentially weightless and could be operated without looking at it. The only problem I ever had with it was that it couldn't charge and play at the same time.
for something useless it worked very, extraordinarily well
Saying it's abuse is quite the overstatement. It's certainly opinionated design.
Contrasted to Microsoft's philosophy where no one is allowed to have a good experience, it's a breath of fresh air.