Advertising isn't neutral. It defaults to bad. It is, by its nature, a distraction. It makes the world worse. It incentivizes a business model where you attract people's attention by any means necessary and then sell off that attention.
Sometimes advertising turns out to be helpful. Sometimes you learn about something that you wouldn't have known to look for that you really care about. Sometimes you're looking for something and find out there's a cheaper competitor product that's perfect for your needs. Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. A giant Pepsi billboard is not making anybody's life better in any way.
> Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case.
This is my point.
Advertising is not inherently bad. To explain that further for the back of the class, advertising is not inherently good. Advertising can be GOOD OR BAD.
I think it general we can say "advertising is not wanted" - bar exceptional side cases like the Super Bowl ads, very few people seek out the advertising that costs big money.
I love catalogs from the companies I buy from, and I love their websites, but those are marketing not advertising.
The vast majority of advertising is at best a "necessary bad" (not per se evil, perhaps).
It's probably not at all the "industry" terms, but I would divide "push advertising" (TV, radio, web ads, blah blah blah) from "pull advertising" (going to the company website, asking for the catalog, etc).
What is sad is how "push advertising" can become something actually desired - once you buy into a luxury brand, for example, you WANT advertising that reinforces just how good and sexy you are for having bought product.
Companies intensely track the percentage of catalogs mailed out that result in an order. They call this number the "order rate," and it's a very important stat for catalogs. You know what's generally seen as a very good order rate? Two percent. Even within that genre, actually deriving any enjoyment or finding a useful product is the exception rather than the rule, and in a time when anyone who wants to see what that company has to offer can check the website, they're effectively useless now.
There are a very small number of catalogs that people are excited to get because the contents are neat. The Sears Holiday Wishbook. Hobbyist magazines. Insane ads for 3D glasses and plans to convert a vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft in Boy Scout magazines. But these are needles in a haystack of recycled paper.
Eh, I guess it really depends on how you define "inherently bad." For example, I'd also call "shooting people" inherently bad, but there are certainly cases where a specific shooting is a net good (self defense, etc). It sounds like your definition is different and may require any possible instance to be bad.
> Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad.
I don't agree.
I don't want to convince you or change your mind but I believe that most advertising is default immoral with few exceptions. Of course feeling that way myself I believe that it's a valid point of view, and I do make purchasing decisions based on it. In line with the article's thesis:
> feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product merely for a bit more money
I too am surprised that as little as this revenue can be in relation to the hardware and app store revenue that they're leaning into it this hard.
I would agree with you that "most advertising" (your words) is currently immoral in that it tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed. Or: *Spam*
But I don't think that is due to advertising in general being "default immoral". There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something.
As an aside: Accepting money in exchange for promotion without making it clear that you have been paid is certainly immoral.
> tends to be a sub-par product pushed out the door for reasons based in greed
I don't think bad products are immoral, just bad.
> There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something.
There's a difference between _paying to get something_, and _paying me to do something_. For instance, we can probably agree that paying to receive a stolen television and paying me to build you a television are different even if the buyer-side transaction characteristics are the same.
That's where advertising breaks down in morality. When party A pays party B to receive party C's attention without party C agreeing to be a part of this transaction at all.
That's why I say "most": sometimes party C is in fact knowingly participating. Maybe they get something in exchange for their attention (access to a costly-to-run website, or a reduced rate on an otherwise costly-to-print magazine). Obviously that line is fuzzy for something like the App Store where the money is going to Apple's margins which are kinda sorta part of the product pricing but clearly the price of the hardware isn't going down but Apple's clearly within their rights to set their own pricing and...? It's fuzzy for sure but I sure didn't knowingly agree to be advertised to on a device that I bought before they started doing this. And consent is hard to talk about in a duopoly environment as well.
Anyway again I'm not here to argue with you about it and I don't care one way or the other if you agree with me. I just wanted to point out that your axioms about "fundamentally immoral" aren't everybody's axioms.
The most you pay for advertising, the less you pay for the product.
If you have a 10$ capital to start a company and you allocate 9$ for advertising (and marketing), you're left with 1$ to build a shitty product.
It's a simple mathematical formula : For a given selling price tag, the amount dedicated for advertising your product is inversely proportional to the amount dedicated to build your product.
I don't mind magazine advertising, because those are hyper-specific to the topic you're actually interested in, because you bought a magazine all about it. If I'm reading a woodworking magazine and I see an ad for a new type of clamp or jig a company is advertising, yeah I'm interested! (Free "magazines" are trash, I'm talking about Fine Homebuilding, Ontario Out of Doors, etc.)
Online advertising is almost universally trash for me, and I'm not sure I've ever spent a cent because of it. It's always useless and irrelevant (no I don't need a car, or lipstick, alcohol, or iced tea, I'm super not interested in any of those). And yet, someone must be clicking those ads. I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products, and I was floored! Who clicks ads?!
I don't understand your comment. Where did I say that? My point is that I don't mind magazine advertising because it's hyper-specific to a topic I actively wanted to read, but online advertising is so random that none of it is ever relevant.
> I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products
So, you would agree then that when the content and relevance of an ad surpasses some threshold, the ad is good and that when ads are "useless and irrelevant" they are bad?
There is no such thing as 'good advertising', least of all on a mobile platform that has to fit the maximum possible ads into a small phone screen viewport.
As a child, I remember very creative ads for Smirnoff vodka; those would not be possible today because marketing budgets simply see more ROI in targeted advertising, which tends to be bland text search ads or ugly display ads like this.
The days of Mad Men style aspirational, full-page, high production quality ads are gone, thanks to Real Time Bidding ad networks that made Google and Facebook their fortune. We've been living in the RTB world for close to 20 years.
Nothing is "inherently or automatically bad". Good and bad are matters of opinion, not fact.
In my opinion, all ads are bad, and the world would be a better place if advertising were strictly limited to publishing product details in some kind of directory (think along the lines of a phone book).
This. Advertising is a fair idea in principle. When you make a new company that truly revolutionizes a product or service, people won't magically find out about it overnight. Word of mouth takes time. As a customer, I don't want to wait years for a good product to get memed before I find out about it. I want to know right away! But the ads are never for revolutionary products that just came out, that I would love to buy. They're always for crap I would never pay for in a million years.
I know there's all the studies about mere exposure effect and what not. Yaawn. It seems like the dominant paradigm by far is that no matter how shitty your product, no matter how much you hate your customers (and vice versa), you can just nag them into buying it with enough saturation marketing. I don't get how people just accept this uncritically as a law of nature.
Why can't the ads be for quality stuff that people actually care about? Everyone's so obsessed with tracking every aspect of my life, so how come they just show the same slot app ad to every single person regardless, even if I've never shown interest in anything similar in a million years?
I remember back in the 90s-ternet, I would get lots of relevant ads for products, sites relevant to me. I loved looking at and clicking at ads, since they made me discover companies that I enjoyed for years after. I don't think they did any of this modern analytics stuff, they probably just had some guy with a good intuitive understanding of a site's userbase and what they care about go on his gut feeling. Maybe we should go back.
Until they make ads an OS-level feature, this doesn't bother me on a practical level, because I don't use any first party apps of theirs. I'm thinking about how this affects, me, and I don't think I use any Apple apps on a daily basis. I guess I never thought about how none of the best apps (imho) in any category I use on iOS are made by Apple. I agree with the premise of the article, but I can work around this phase of Apple's heel turn.
My brain just melted reading this. I am sorry but this doesn't make sense and reads like a GPT-3 prompt. Which part of the comment is supposed to be related to the advertisement on app store of apple ?
Identity politics are antithetical to marxist theory but not necessarily to the marxist movements as they actually existed.
Here, things get more complicated because there were marxist movements all over the world, from Africa to Asia to Russia, and each had different motivations and often different goals.
In Russia, marxism was always about identity first and foremost, primarily the identity of various outcast/conquered groups: poles, jews, germans, lithuanians, etc. that were in the conquered regions in the Western part of the Empire - primarily the regions that used to be held by Poland. The abstruse economic theories served as a type of schelling point for a coalition of minorites against the Russian Orthodox majority, and after the revolution there was a systematic effort to suppress Russian identity and replace it with a new "Soviet" identity -- e.g. if you look at the list of Soviet general secretaries, only one of them was Russian (although there is some debate as several of the secretaties had mysterious, and in some cases, clearly invented pasts). There were explicit anti-Russian policies put in place, for example there were communist parties in all the provinces except the Russian province, which had no communist party, and thus no road for advancement except to join the overall Soviet Communist Party, but that preferenced non-Russians for membership.
Similarly when the Soviets drew the borders of various provinces, they explicitly made the minority provinces much larger, dragging in traditional Russian lands, even as they created local minority communist parties that barred Russians from participation, effectively meaning that 1/3 of Russians were living in an explicitly non-Russian province, even though often times they were the majority population in that province.
At the same time, Marxism in other areas had a decidedly nationalist tone - for example in Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam or other nations fighting colonialism. Here, too, it was identity and nationalism that was the motivating factor and not the economic theories.
Really class-based movements are generally limited to the "West" -- e.g. Western Europe and North America. I'm not saying that class isn't important elsewhere, but when you look at what animates radical movements throughout the world, it's almost always race/religion/language that plays the dominant role, and this is as true for marxist movements as for other types of movements.
When I saw ads in the Windows Start menu, I switched to Ubuntu. Haven't looked back and life is good. Except that the command line command apt-get sometimes displays an ad for Ubuntu Pro...
If the computer is supposed to be a "bicycle for the mind", then shouldn't it be designed to enhance our thinking, and also to force us to "think differently"?
You have to learn how to ride a bike. It involves some scraped knees.
Tools like the command line and exercise equipment help improve capability and personal agency. Hiding either away pushes the default toward passive consumption.
Even though I agree with you on a personal level, this kind of thinking does not lead to mainstream adoption. If there were a Linux distro that "just worked", we could have the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be something that will happen in the foreseeable future.
I'd love for a company like System76 to come out with such a solution, but it is certainly an expensive, difficult endeavour.
How does typing cryptic, badly named two-three letter commands (with no less idiotic and inconsistent flags) enhance your thinking?
The default shell and utter lack of well designed autocomplete or hints is a like a bad trip back to tape machines, punch codes and weird idiosyncracies from a bygone PDP11 era.
It's absolute piss and nobody should be dealing with it unless they want to for whatever reason.
Maybe those people should take some time out of their lives to learn the basics of how computers work instead of expecting the computers to be dumbed down to their level at the expense of their usefulness to others.
How is apt not crypic?
It's the bona fide definition of it, every part of it.
1. It spits out mountains of cryptic gibberish when you use it.
2. It literally contains "Advanced" in it's textbook nondescript three letter abbreviation.
3. Without a fairly intimate understanding of it's hairy inner workings on how exactly dependency and package conflicts are resolved, it will fuck things up and fuck things up quite royaly. Matter of time really.
4. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that it WILL fuck things up even if you do understand that whole house of cards,
but you will atleast know how to duct tape your way out of it.
Again reminder: How exactly does this enchance "our thinking" in any shape or form exactly?
The play/pause media key automatically starting the Music app, suggestions defaulting to include content from paid services (hey that movie is available on Apple TV!), maps links only working with Apple Maps, searching for selected text opens Safari and disregards your primary browser, permanently enabled share menu options for iCloud and Airdrop.
Privacy settings increasingly spread out and opaquely named. No more central unique identifier reset button, but individual ones for each app placed in different submenus. Completely disabling Siri has become some sort of Easter egg hunt. Not that it'll actually stop the data outflow, though.
Aggressive surfacing of ecosystem capabilities such as proximity unlock by nearby Apple watch, wake on bluetooth or network, etc. These features were previously configurable through the GUI, but those conveniences have been removed and the features are enabled by default.
Local configuration profiles (a free, easy, local, and accessible way to configure your system) are being slowly phased out in favour of third party remote Mobile Device Management services such as Jamf or, of course, the one Apple launched not too long ago.
These new advertisements are so prominent and the implementation so obviously bad, that I'm almost suspecting them to be merely a distraction from the much more insidious tricks they've been pulling in the background.
> The play/pause media key automatically starting the Music app
$ sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app
This was a common complaint I have heard from those coming from Windows/Android and even Linux... It's unix.
Also, the play/pause key works with other apps. Other default apps can be set.
Many other valid points in this article and thread, but I don't know why people expect the default behavior of the play button to behave any differently when no media is playing. Music.app may have an upsell, but it's still a place to organize your own personal music library. No cloud or SaaS required.
Solutions aplenty yes, just not for, say, my mother. Not providing a normal way for users to select a an alternative default (like competitor Spotify), is disproportionally inconvenient relative to the benefits for Apple.
Accidental music app launches by my pinky finger brushing the play/pause touchbar control strip button, well.. let's just say it happened more then once. Absolutely maddening.
Play/pause always starts the Music app, regardless of your preferred music player. It's annoying for those of us who don't use the built-in Music app at all.
Your command doesn't work. The music app actually lives at `/System/Applications/Music.app`. And since Monterey, I think, even sudo won't let you modify data in that folder because of macOS's built-in protections that cannot be disabled:
chmod: Unable to change file mode on /System/Applications/Music.app: Read-only file system
Even disabling SIP and booting into safe mode doesn't let you do this.
If you haven't seen it yet, NoTunes[1] does a great job of fixing the hijacking of the play button or when bluetooth headphones are connected or disconnected.
There are solutions, but on some level this is no different from telling Windows users to just tweak some registry keys. It all leads to the same place.
As I read TFA, I thought to myself, "if it gets bad enough, I'll just load Linux on my Macs." And then it occurred to me how I got started using Apple products. So grab a cuppa for story time. It was a time that I worked for Microsoft, and mmm, mmm, wasn't that uncarbonated company soft drink tasty. But as I dicked with some Plays for Sure(tm) device for the last time, I got fed up and told the spouse, "get in the car, we're going to BellSquare to buy iPods." iPods turned into ditching the Windows Phones for iPhones, then a hackintosh to get a feel for OS X Leopard, then "fine, I'll get a MacBook if I'm going to do iOS development on the side".
Fast-forward fifteen years, and it's a house full of HomeKit, Apple Watches (loving that new Ultra), MacBooks, HomePods, etc. It all works well together, so it's easy to justify ditching $DEVICE for an Apple product. And when Apple Premium (one price for all of Apple's services such as TV+, iCloud storage, et. al.) came around, well, of course I said "put that on the Apple Card, please."
The point I'm driving at is that a household of Apple products started with one simple purchase of a couple of music players. But keep up the advertising crap to the point that I'm loading a non-Apple OS on Apple hardware, and that unravelling thread might take the rest with it. "It all works so well together" is a blessing and a curse. I'm pretty sure that if, whatever the reason, we ditch the iPhones the rest of it goes with them.
I was a very happy Windows user and purchased legit licenses for myself and my business. I didn't hate the Mac but I had only used it since OS 9 and I felt Windows was much more stable and customizable. Years go by and I find myself not being able to get a Windows XP license to install because my activation code from the box didn't work. I spend 5+ hours talking to all kinds of support. No one can help me get past this activation code.
And that was it. I switched everything to Apple. Anything purchased new for myself or my business was Apple. Windows, Microsoft, Xbox, etc. I won't even consider. The only thing I've used that's Microsoft in the last 20+ years is Github.
With their present moves, I know my relationship with Apple products will end with a similar sentiment.
Something like that, back in the day I had it memorized and would use it even when I had purchased a perfectly valid license, too hard to look around at the back of the computer (even with a valid sticker you were supposed to put it in a place that wasn't "removable").
I'm not sure what revision of Windows Phone it was (they restarted that thing so often) but there was one with Tiles I believe (looked like the Windows 7 start menu) that was pretty nice. Friend had it; Microsoft really made a HUGE mistake here by not just continuing it for years and years, they'd now have a solid third place offering that could be very business friendly by now if they'd done the standard Microsoft incremental improvement.
But ignore the device, and notice how the UI looks at lot like a Windows PC desktop of era. Now imagine that against even the earliest of iPhones. Ballmer going on about how the iPhone was going to fail sure aged well.
Later versions of Windows Phone would improve on it in a big way, as you point out, but by then it was way too late. Perhaps if they poured more money into it as you suggest, but Microsoft was already paying devs to port their apps, and there were still big holes in the app lineup.
My friend had a Windows Phone 7 device, which was 90000% different from what you have in every way, and not compatible, either.
Then they trashed that and tried something else that looked similar but was completely different. Just an entirely broken strategy. You can't kill your few supporters every single generation!
It would have been like OS X not being able to run applications from System 7/8/9 or dropping PPC applications entirely on the x86 Macs.
They had some developers going with Phone 7, half intrigued by the slickness of the 7 OS on the Nokia. (I think it was Nokia?) It didn't help that MS did weird things to Nokia, MSs reputation wasn't very good back then for other reasons too. The Ballmer memos were still recent.
Phone 7 was really nice though, way faster than iOS as I recall it and with some cool tiles on the home screen.
Then they changed so apps made for 7 didn't work with 8.
That was it, the little developer base they had just packed up and left.
Their UI strategy was super weird, ever used Xamarin?
Let's just say it was like they hired a college grad to build it for a summer, then they built a heavy wrapper around Android UI libraries...so weird.
I think they were trying to pull a "dev on all platforms" but only years late to the game and with no real value proposition, other than supporting a vanishing small portion of users...
Yeah, the unique Metro UI and good-looking Nokia phones had me interested. Though it wasn't enough for me to actually pony up the cash to buy one. Guess that was part of the problem!
Yes, they had a bit of momentum behind Windows Phone 7 and they threw it all away with the breaking change for Windows Phone 8. And that was it for that platform.
Windows ce 6 phone? They haven’t been made since 2009, I believe. They topped out at 256meg of ram, if I remember correctly with the last models before everyone switched to Android 2 point something. Can it do 4g? I know 2g has been shut down and 3g is on its last legs if any carriers even support it. Those wince models cant even do WPA2 for Wi-Fi. How do you set it up as an internet device?
I’m genuinely curious since the software is so out of date I can’t even get it setup with visual studio 2008 on an xp computer to develop apps for it. Their are so many hoops to jump through and it maybe that the usb doesn’t work with it in the end that I gave up.
You might be confusing my use of "still <have> the device" with "used in the last ten years". I don't even know if the thing will boot anymore. I'm not a collector, I just don't throw things away anywhere near as quickly as I should.
Free to a good home (as in, you won't just tie it in the backyard and never pay attention to it) if anyone has a hankering for an old HTC Advantage. Great machine in the day, I even edited Word docs on it (albeit, painfully), but I wouldn't let it anywhere near an Internet connection.
It'll probably boot just fine, and yeah, I wouldn't take it online, but old hardware is like hobbits - difficult to daunt or kill. It's like the cell network wouldn't even connect (though if it is old enough it might).
HTC made the best wince devices. The best thing about the platform was the built in handwriting recognition on every wince device regardless of manufacturer which was designed by the same develops who worked on the Apple Newton handwriting software. It was just more buried on some devices. Of course, Microsoft killed this with windows phone 7. Just a different era
> But keep up the advertising crap to the point that I'm loading a non-Apple OS on Apple hardware, and that unravelling thread might take the rest with it.
Not everyone can do this or will do this.
Apple captured way too much power, and now they're free to boil us all. They basically own American consumer computing and mobile business computing. 51+% of it all, anyway.
By taking moves like this, I think it shows the platform is too powerful a market entity and that the government needs to put restrictions on what Apple can and cannot do, and lift Apple's own restrictions against app developers and competing businesses.
I am a big Apple user (iPhone, air tags, air pods, MacBook etc) but I definitely don’t feel “captured” in any way. If their products start sucking then I’m voting with my feet and my wallet.
I’d much rather support the market driven approach than to assign this responsibility and authority over to the Govt.
There is little market anymore. You want to reach Americans, you bow to Apple or Google, jump through absurd hoops, and pay a tax for something you don't even want or need.
There was nothing wrong with the desktop software model. It's all artificial process now. Manual review, no ability to deploy on your own ("release trains" shouldn't be a thing), unnecessary mandatory engineering work to meet new interface guidelines, required opt-ins to programs that further erode your customer relationship ("login with").
I vastly prefer the government to keep hands off, but in this case we've reached the impenetrable event horizon and need a Deus Ex to restore reasonable competition.
Companies should be free to deploy technology to customers without being unduly taxed.
> Companies should be free to deploy technology to customers without being unduly taxed.
"Companies except Apple", right? Apple you want to be taxed, in the form of giving up profits that you feel are excessive, but which only grow because more users and developers find the deal valuable.
I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the App Store. You know how much I would have made without the App Store? Approximately $0. I have no regrets whatsoever, and feel I got plenty of value for the 30% I paid (this was before the 15% rate for SMB).
I just don't see it. Windows, Android, and Linux are all viable and people can (and do) prefer them.
It seems profoundly weird to say that Apple is succeeding in the market because they offer a more closed, curated, even censored ecosystem... so the government must force them to operate more like the platforms that users like less.
And it gets even weirder to say that in the name of freedom and free markets we must protect consumers from ecosystems that work the way they want.
I would generally agree with you if it weren’t for the fact that not only has Apple, among others like Microsoft, totally captured and compromised the government, but the very point of government is to protect and preserve fundamental concepts that are core to the society, one of which is fair and real competition, not this fake illusion of competition where, you are free to leave for a competitor if you can make it across the minefield alive, and give up all the pleasantries of the golden cage.
You even seemingly contradict yourself within two sentences; if alternatives are viable, then government wouldn’t even need to enforce anything users like less, because they would actually be viable and real alternatives that are competitive. When people are starting to discuss government stepping in to enforce fair and actual competition, generally things are extremely out of whack already and in a functioning society and government that government would have already stepped in a long time ago. Alas, our government and society are neither healthy nor even have legitimacy.
For some perspective; the same people who tend to lament “slavery” of a very specific narrow historical narrative, are also the ones who do not see the obvious that plantation slavery was essentially the practical outcome of the communism con job, equally poor outcomes for the masses that the very few “more equal than the rest” benefited from.
So yes, in the name of freedom, government should have, prior to it having had been too late, severely reigned in corruption of the whole American and global system by organized, aka, corporate efforts to do that very thing. Because what is freedom but the only meaningful state of competition, your ability to decide for yourself over your life without others being able to, let alone being supported in controlling it for you.
We are currently in an extremely darkening state where people have been even so manipulated that they cannot even understand what freedom is, let alone insist on it being enforced. Hence, we are getting more and more plantation slaves turning on their own lot trying to fight for their freedom because plantation life is easy and fits within the constraints imposed by the true slavery, mental slavery.
Well that certainly spiraled. I’m suspicious of any technology regulation argument that builds its foundation on plantation slaves. That seems more emotionally manipulative than well-reasoned.
I’m a happy apple ecosystem user. Maybe I’m a plantation slave and don’t realize it, but it doesn’t feel that way?
I know plenty of non-Apple users also happy with their purchasing choices.
From where I sit the calls to prohibit me from choosing an ecosystem that works like Apple’s are generally either from competitors losing in the market or from ideologues who object to Apple’s model in principle and want to force me to use systems that don’t work as well, for my own good , apparently because I’m too dumb to know I’ve been literally enslaved.
Not really an option with M1, no? I know various groups have managed to get something running on Apple silicon, but my impression is that largely this isn't going to be a viable option. I could definitely be wrong.
Actually Linux consistently got worse battery life everywhere I've installed it, PCs and Macs. And it often had quirks with things not working workout much fiddling.
I may go back someday when I'm retired, with free time on my hands. Or when forced off the easier proprietary OS's by a thousand cuts.
With laptops it’s best to go with a System76 or a Framework or something else with manufacturer-tested drivers and optimizations, rather than installing on a non-Linux machine. There’s just too much work put into modern power efficiency for a one-size-fits-all OS to match. The most recent run in I had with this was an HP OLED laptop I bought, put Linux on, and found out that the kernel had no ability to adjust brightness on the OLED so it was at maximum all the time. I had to return it.
It's hard to see it now but the mobile phone is a dying product category. Apple in a way acknowledged this when they started their pivot to services and the market acknowledged this when they became fixated on whether Apple could maintain revenues for iPhone upgrades (they can't). They are capturing the value they can from iPhone before its completely unprofitable because of new paradigms of computing that Apple themselves will be delivering. Nearly every major change or product release in Apple is well gamed out and planned for 5-10 years in advance, some of these moves longer. Withering the iPhone with Ads is a very deliberate decision and done so on a timetable with many other priorities and strategies. Part of maintaining relevancy is cannibalizing your own business with newer, better ways of delivering value. This is a way that Apple can extract the most profit from their cannibalization of iPhone.
You are giving Apple way too much credit. All it shows is that the team responsible for driving increases to service revenue has been gaining influence relative to the more user-centric teams. These moves are also very dangerously raising their antitrust profile which seems massively short-sighted.
Companies this large behave much more like some sort of octopus / slime mold hybrid than a primate and giving them credit as if all the moves are well thought out top down plans is rarely correct.
You've not been paying close enough attention to Apple for the last 25 years and are undervaluing Apple's executive team. Planned execution and road mapping have led Apple to where they are. Methodical and steady.
Similar story here. 20 years ago I was a Windows user. I had no love for Windows, but I put up with it. I had never even considered buying a Mac because to me they were just overpriced dumbed down PCs for people who were not technical. I didn't know anything about them.
Then I bought an iPod with click wheel.
I fell in love with it from the minute I opened the packaging. It just felt like a device that a lot of care was put into. I loved holding it and it was a pleasure to use. It made me rethink Apple.
When it was time to buy a new laptop, I bought the 2006 black MacBook. I felt the same thing all over again, but now for my primary computing device. I loved OS X.
Fast forward to today and I also have a house full of Apple products. Just in my line of sight I have several Mac laptops, Magic Keyboard/touchpad, a few iPhones, an iPad, AirPods... over the years I've purchased dozens of Apple products. Not to mention my subscriptions to Apple TV+, iCloud Storage, Apple Music...
But Apple is increasingly a very different company than before. I now feel like they are nickel and diming me at every possible turn and it's no longer even subtle. When I picked up my iPhone 14 Pro at the Apple Store, I was in disbelief at how hard the Apple Employee tried to upsell Apple Care using hard sell scare tactics.
I doubt anything will ever change under Tim Cook. Maybe some day Scott Forstall will return in Jobs-like fashion and correct the company's course.
Very nice stories. I just switched to Linux on my laptop to avoid all the iCloud ads. Now I'm considering ditching my iPhone too because as you say my laptop and my iPhone no longer work together perfectly anyway. So I have a bunch more options for phones!
Funny how a lot of companies should just hire a designer to become as good as Apple, but that never happens. Companies insist on naming their product WX1000 (hi Sony), or adding a BOM to SOAP requests to make their products incompatible (hi Microsoft).
So yes, Apple gear is ultraexpensive, does little, cable breaks and lifelong souvenir photos are locked up in iCloud.
Unfortunately, this is still a much better experience than the Linux or Windows world.
It’s only a matter of various companies having to do fewer dark patterns to win over the market, but that never happens.
100% just because they control their hardware. Not a design thing, mostly.
Linux is like living in the engine room - fantastic if you love engines. Windows is like a mirror house where someone tried to renovate but left all the mirrors in, Mac is a pretty jail cell.
The former two have their quirks, but are livable, the later only if you like prison cells...
I don't think many people will enjoy ads in their prison cells, though.
The thing that the other manufacturers seem to struggle with is that you can't phone in major aspects of your product and expect it to be "apple tier". You have to own it end to end, and sometimes even go so far as to fund new manufacturing techniques and machinery to make your product in its fullest form a reality.
This is a bitter pill to swallow in an industry that's thrived on loosely tying together off-the-shelf components and contracting out the rest to the lowest bidders to produce products that often barely make it past the line of "somewhat acceptable", because the "apple way" is hard, expensive, and risky.
I think the main problem is that industry is focused more on keeping users in their little bubble than on actually making better product. And that of course means no actual talk with "competition", because making both of your products work together better might mean some of your customers might go to them for something.
> I doubt anything will ever change under Tim Cook. Maybe some day Scott Forstall will return in Jobs-like fashion and correct the company's course.
I really disliked Scott Forstall being fired from Apple, and have felt that he could’ve added a lot more value to Apple’s products if he’d been around. Apple Maps is still terrible (outside the US and a couple of other countries). So it’s not like firing him resulted in great progress quickly.
Recently John Gruber had posted about it being 10 years since Forstall was forced out of Apple. [1] I’m guessing many others feel similarly that his presence could’ve made a positive difference. Now it’s Tim Cook’s ego that would block him from being hired at Apple again.
1. Have Apple everything
2. Through an internship at Microsoft, get a Windows laptop and Windows Phone
3. Fall in love with both experiences
4. Switch to Android
5. Decide my next computer will be a Linux gaming machine
Over time, I learned that most parts of the ecosystem can be swapped out for alternatives that are almost as good, but without nearly as much vendor lock-in. As soon as you experience this, the value proposition of Apple comes into question.
Apple is also ramping up the lock-in. You can’t use iOS 16 passkeys without using iCloud and iCloud Keychain. You can’t activate HomePods without an iOS device logged in to iCloud.
They really want you to be logged in and identified across all products now and forever.
I have sort of a reverse story. It was trying to manage an iPod without a Macintosh that swore me off Apple forever. Jobs described iTunes for Windows as "a glass of ice water in hell". From where I was sitting Windows was the ice water.
I’d like to say that I have a similar story here, but I skipped the Windows/IBM-PC phase and went straight from TRS-80 to the very first Macintosh.
This all feels like a betrayal of the slightly rebellious, iconoclastic attitudes of the early Apple days. But untangling my family from this web of lock-in? Oy. You want to switch to Linux? My spouse, maybe. My 14 y/o, never. And even if I were to succeed, I would have a new full-time job as household IT help desk.
For every person who cares about avoiding surveillance capitalism, ads, and distractions, there are ten thousand who shrug their shoulders and keep scrolling.
> ” I willingly paid a tremendous amount for the hardware, and I choose to pay nearly $500 annually to access Apple services, but seeing ads being further promulgated across the software feels, well, gross.”
I stopped paying to see ads when I quit subscription TV. I feel I will soon have to quit paying for ads when getting a new phone.
What does that even mean in the context of the article. The article is about apple introducing ads in their store. Something like "My take on Apple introducing ads on their store" would be way better.
I'm fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem and I have always been puzzled when I hear about Apple perverting their product with the taint of advertisements. I recently realized that my puzzlement is because I don't use Apple News or Stocks and I do all app discovery away from the (cr)Appstore.
Unfortunately, I guess that the advertising infection will spread to the point where it is unavoidable. At that point, I will drop Apple and pray that there is a functional alternative.
There are no good alternatives, but I mostly use reddit and general websearches (filtering out the ever prevalent blogspam). I'd probably pay for a ton more apps if the appstore wasn't so terrible.
I usually rely on word of mouth through people I know or follow on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc. I can't recall a time recently where I've sat down, opened up the App Store, browsed for something useful
I do all my work on Macs, and I love the ergonomics of MacOS, but I refuse to use any Apple apps. I hate how Apple broke its own Save/Save As paradigm, and the iOS-ification of things like iTunes/music on the desktop. I use Little Snitch to block all Apple services except in rare instances where I want to download something from the App Store.
Feels like when the App Store first launched and was quickly dominated by fart apps, except this isn't being driven by devs polluting the App Store, it's being driven by Apple to an already polluted App Store.
I don't know about Google Play, but Apple's App Store has absolutely horrific search. More often than not, I am googling the app name then finding the App Store link from Google Search results
I don't think I've heard that. Do you mean complaints that iOS should be more like Android and not require all software go through the App Store? I've definitely heard that complaint. (And made it, at least on general principle.)
If not all apps have to go through the Apple App Store and multiple App Stores are allowed that are controlled by third parties (ie: not Apple,) what makes you think those stores would be ad-free? Simply put, I think that having multiple app sources naturally leads to ads in the App Store space.
Mind you, I hate ads and am in no way arguing in favor of them.
Nothing makes me think that. :) I just don't understand what's better about the Android App Store, unless it's ad-free. (Which would surprise me, mildly, given Google's core business!)
Between Google Search decreasing in usability and accuracy for pretty much everyone I know in service of more Ads, Netflix Ad tier causing an exodus and now Apple poisoning what was their premium brand to squeeze ad revenue I can't help but think these businesses are starting to cannibalize their core value to their users in service to their shareholders. Companies with Ads are like Rats in that experiment with the button and a wire going to their pleasure center. Tap the button all day but they won't actually do anything useful and everything else wastes away.
For a while I've been thinking about the public markets and each time I arrive at the conclusion that the public markets can be really bad for consumers and bad for the businesses themselves. In the end the pursuit of higher stock value for share holders in the short term puts a company at odds with it's customers and it's own initial value proposition. Obviously an IPO is a desirable goal for founders, and maybe (very obviously?) more so their investors because it's a liquidity event and everyone get's paid, but I think for any one running a successful company thinking about what you shackle you and your company to by going public should be a long and hard think, because you're going to wind up making choices at the expense of literally every value and use your business purported to represent.
This is also why when choosing to make a startup, as defined by a high growth company designed to quickly arrive at a liquidity event (IPO and publicly traded obviously included) you should really understand if you want exactly that. I've watched at least one founder realize she didn't want that and that she did want to run a business for the customers and the value they were being provided and try to get off the train and it basically wrecked the business.
When I read stuff like this I'm always reminded of the line in Aesop Rock's song "None Shall Pass":
"Fine, sign of the swine in the swarm
when a king is a whore who comply and conform"
I guess this was a really long winded way of saying, know the game you're playing before you choose to play it and know who's actually calling the shots.
I think ad driven markets are a trap in themselves, even outside the public market itself.
You have a large portion of end users themselves that will never pay for the product but gladly use the product 'for free'. You have users that would pay for the product, but again, why would they pay for the product if it's "free"? This leaves the only viable products in the market as free products. The only model I know for free service is ad and data collection driven.
The business world won't be able to escape this trap themselves, it will be driven by consumer protections and data privacy making targeted advertising via data collection more risky at a legal/compliance level.
I love my Apple products but I am incredibly worried about Apple's future. I hate ads, I never see them, if something is showing me ads I pay to remove them or stop using that app/service. Currently I'm incessed by Zoom showing me ads after calls even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it.
It's incredibly saddening to see Apple start to put ads in more things. It's not the premium experience I'm looking for (and paying for). I love linux for servers but I'm sorry, the desktop is just not my cup of tea. One things on the mac that I enjoy is the quality and style of most 3rd party apps that I use. It's a level of polish that I don't see anywhere else, at least at the same consistency. Call me vain, call me whatever you want but I like looking at pretty UI, I'm staring at my monitors for 8+ hours a day, I'd like to enjoy what I'm doing. An ugly UI isn't unusable but it adds a small subconscious "tax" that is real and does add up (at least for me).
I pay Apple $20 a month for Apple One. I refuse to pay and see ads at the same time.
If I am going to see only 1 ad in a normal Apple app (Maps, Music, Podcasts etc.) Apple can kiss that money goodbye.
For every Apple Service there’s a good alternative. I’ll turn my iPhone into a piece of Apple hardware with minimal affiliation to Apple software within the afternoon.
From there on out, I’ll start investigating to replace my Apple hardware with alternatives at their next renewal cycle.
For Apple end users, Tim Cook is the worst CEO you could imagine. A human Excel sheet.
Is Tim Cook really the problem? Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of directors first, and Tim Cook can only stay CEO as long as he's acting in their interests. Maybe it's too easy to blame the system, but I don't see how Tim Cook should take the majority blame.
> Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of directors first, and Tim Cook can only stay CEO as long as he's acting in their interests.
And it is his job to explain to them that plastering ads all over the UI is going to destroy the entire privacy-conscious image that Apple has built up over the past decade, specially the past five or so years.
You can't just say "There was no alternative but to show ads", it's a reductio ad (lol) absurdum by which you can excuse any bad decisions that a CEO makes by saying "Well, the board made them do it".
Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of directors first
First, no. That's a gross oversimplification of the situation, and there are thousands of counter-examples. It's one of those things people see on HN and then pass along as if it was the absolute truth. It isn't.
But, for fun, let's pretend it is true. Then the way Tim Cook answers to shareholders is to preserve the long-term value of Apple as a brand and a company, and not to sell out for short-term gains.
The majority of Apple shareholders are massive corporations that invest for the long-haul, not day traders trying to make a quick buck.
The problem goes deeper and is one we see everywhere- the stock price has to always go up. This is only good for shareholders, for everyone else it is usually bad. How does humanity solve this feedback loop? The free market dream doesn't seem to be working.
Only one I've seen for a while is the one trying to get me to try Apple Arcade for free for 3 months. I don't know how long I have to ignore it before they get the message that I barely game on my phone and tablets, don't want to game on them more than I do, and have no interest whatsoever in the service.
But yeah, it's an ad. At least you can dismiss it. Dunno how long it'll stay gone (this just prompted me to go tell it "not now", so we'll see).
This new “not now” rhetoric is annoying me so much. It is so user-unfriendly to deny them the definitive in their decision. These dark patterns creep in anywhere that I get the impression that every eco-system and operating system becomes actively hostile to the user.
It's so tough taking stances to defend things of 'intangible' (or at least hard to quantify) value like Apple has. I worry it's almost 'inevitable' for companies to cave in.
I miss the days when Jobs would tell shareholders to pound sand rather than make product compromises.
Under Tim Cook, there is no possible way things will get better, and I suspect they will get much worse. They'll continue making whatever comprises to the user experience are necessary to obtain quarterly growth. And the more difficult that becomes, the more drastic and user hostile the changes will be.
It's bizarrely short-sighted, and I can't figure out why. I mean there are several videos of Steve Jobs himself warning about this exact trajectory, and I'm sure Tim Cook must have seen them.
Unfortunately, Tim Cook does not have the force of personality to stop it. Nobody does. Only Steve Jobs could do it, and that is likely exclusively down to the fact (whether you consider it as such or not is beside the point) that he saved Apple. The fact is, if you tell the shareholders no too frequently, you stop being in charge. And even if the next guy shares your vision, will his replacement? How many CEOs does it take until you get someone who will pursue short-term profit at any long-term cost?
They have in-app ads like this: https://cs.joshstrange.com/zTpdlC (Note: dismissing this does next to nothing, it's back almost every day or at least as often as Zoom restarts)
I've gone through almost all the settings I could think of but I don't see a way to disable it. I pay monthly for Zoom and I'm logged into that account. I find it beyond the pale that Zoom wastes my time/energy in this way especially since most ads are about a product I will never use. If I need a tool to run a 500+ person webinar my life has taken a horrible turn, and if I did I wouldn't use Zoom since they do crap like this.
Yeah I see ads as the biggest threat to my future in their ecosystem. It's a revenue stream that seems to so reliably ruin any company that dips more than the tiniest bit of a toe into it. Which sucks because they're by such a large margin the least-bad option that I hate to be stuck with any of the alternatives. Of which the largest (Microsoft, Google) are at least as bad on the advertising front, so that leaves me with... Linux. And just no remotely-OK solution for phones and tablets, at all. I have so very little interesting in "tinkering" with those platforms.
Damnit, Microsoft, why'd you have to ruin your OS with ad and spying garbage and shittifying your calculator and notepad apps et c. just as you were starting to add useful stuff like WSL that might have made it a viable OS for actual work and not just playing video games?
So I guess it's Linux. Ugh. Or maybe the FreeBSD driver situation will get better before then and I can use that. That'd be... fine, I guess.
> Currently I'm incessed by Zoom showing me ads after calls even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it.
Zoom has plenty of competitors that don't show ads after calls. Try a few out. Some of them are a much better experience for participants and hosts alike.
I feel genuine empathy and a little vicarious sadness (not sarcastic or ironic) for all the Apple diehards who loyally went through thick and thin with Apple, including them nearly going out of business, only to discover that Apple is not Different or Exceptional and is, in reality, just another large publicly traded company with the goal of maximizing shareholder returns.
Apple is a 2+T dollar company. How much is enough? Is is really such a priority to introduce ads to keep growing each and every damned quarter? And what if people stop buying their hardware because of the crap they're doing with their software; will they stop ads to refocus on hardware or will they milk the fuck out of the people who do keep buying their hardware?
It's never enough for investors (all of us, really). That's the difference between public and private companies. One must seek profit over all, and the other is run by people can choose not to do so.
The problem is he incentive to squeeze money out of ads because there’s less innovation happening elsewhere. Yes they’re M* chips but I mean big innovation.
how do we ever break the cycle of growth at all costs demanded of public companies?
Marx never specified how “country-wide implementation” should look like, Marxism-Leninism was the most common one. Escaping capitalism in today's world is impossible because the moment you decide to work on different economic model and distance yourself from IMF you'll sign your death sentence. Big players will never allow that.
a worker owned cooperative is the very definition of the workers owning the means of production, so i responded with marxist examples to your comment.
you assume that a country-wide implementation is the only way that marx's ideas can be implemented and that is a wrong assumption.
if organizing as cooperatives was the most common way to structure businesses (rather than a capitalist organization), then you'd have a different, arguably better society. in that situation, you can organize as a capitalistic endeavor if you want, but you'd have a hard time competing with co-ops for labor and other resources. it would be decentralized, entrepreneurs would still get rewarded, there would still be free enterprise, it would be a free labor market, etc.
If we consider average life expectency to be the best indicator of successful implementation (considering once you're dead nothing else matter anymore), Cuba succeded pretty well... Or at least better than the US.
It’s an interesting idea. Based on documentaries about Cuba I’m not sure how happy the people seemed though. They are definitely more fit though from less exposure to processed food and the Western diet.
Why the hell are they entering this grubby, grubby industry? They leave money on the table all the time - they have banged on for years about their whole philosophy of saying No to a thousand things for everything they say Yes to - why have they said yes to this?
Aside from a handful of RPIs, my entire family uses Apple gear. But for the first time in 2 decades, I'm wondering what a platform change might look like.
Considering my investment in Apple gear, even getting me to the "only looking" phase is pretty remarkable.
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
Yeah - I didn't want to invoke the Ghost of Steve but ... why stop with your storefront? Why not start slapping Candy Crush Saga stickers on the front of iPhones?
But unlike other products, this advertising will provide zero value to Apple customers. We already pay full price for our gear. We pay for Apple One. Unlike most other companies where advertising offsets the sticker price of things, advertising at Apple does not benefit us in any way.
For me, being free of advertising is a key benefit of participating in the Apple ecosystem, and one that I assign a significant financial value to. I absolutely hate it.
Apple is still better than the competition in many ways but cracks started appearing. This quote from Steve Jobs is spot on at this time when Apple has become so big that they can't focus on creating a good product anymore because the money is too good. I don't wish to see this but I'm wondering if things were to go the bad direction for Apple, how long would the inertia of good apple of Steve Jobs vision would last. Probably something like a decade if not more...
You mistake "they" referring to Apple with Steve Jobs.
Yes it's cliche. That doesn't make it wrong. Steve Jobs was responsible for keeping Apple pure.
I really feel like an inflection point in human history will be Steve Jobs dying in 2011, right after releasing revolutionary products (iPhone and iPad), but not being able to be around to steer the ship and be the voice of reason and ethics as the products became more influential.
Steve Jobs once said (in the D8 interview I believe) that apps which defamed people were not allowed on the App Store. I wonder how he would feel about social media today, Twitter in particular.
He would have had the courage, power, and conviction to fight against some of the things happening today, in terms of widespread outrage culture, slandering and libel, cancel culture, etc.
Context matters, he might be a terrible person to work under but he clearly was the voice of reason for Apple.
Just remember how he said that Apple is not interested in games. It was somewhat of a shocker since they would lose so much clients because of that but look where we are now. The Apple Arcade and other pathetic attempts just proves how right he was. Why enter a market where your results will be laughably bad? It is pathetic how they present "Lara Croft Tomb Raider" which is 4+ year old game benchmarks in 2022 on 1080p 60fps and 4k 30fps as if it's somehow good.
And remember the cringe moment where they presented Touch Bar with some DJ? Jesus...
To be fair, Apple Arcade is pretty good. Great, even. And Apple keeps it completely pure — no ads, no in-app purchases, and some really great games
They may not be publishing games for hardcode gamers, but there are some great indie titles, and it's the only place on the App Store I let my kids have free reign to download what they like, knowing that they will never see an ad or be lured into some grindy game mechanic to tempt them into an in-app purchase
Nothing wrong with those indie games, but what role does Apple play here, that justifies crediting them for innovation, asking money, etc?! Isn't that like praising Amazon Web services for this great FOSS ecosystem they "innovated"?
Wouldn't it make more sense to pay indie developers instead of Apple? Apple could still offer a curated list to promote their hardware etc. but in the store front setup it looks like the only "innovation" they made was tax.
I think my message came off unclear. I wasn't praising Apple for the games themselves, but rather the policy of:
- No ads
- No in app purchase
- Curating a collection of good games to include on the platform
Apple does pay the developers for being on Apple Arcade. Including funding the development of bespoke titles, as well as ongoing payments for the duration the game is listed on the Arcade service.
Their gear is too good: I'm on year 4 with my Watch, my iPad is 3 or 4 years old, and the only reason I upgrade my iPhone every couple of years is for the camera.
And there just aren't that many Android users willing to switch.
Dividends and stock buybacks are keeping their shareholders happy, but at some point they need a growth story, and the iPhone set an incredible bar to hurdle.
(I'm not defending their ad business, to be clear, but it's hardly shocking that they're trying to find something to bring in new revenue.)
If only they could make even more money from video games. Too bad Apple hates video games and they only tolerate them now since it’s a sizable chunk of revenue. Yet it still feels that they have yet to make a large enough bet / investment on games.
There used to be a time when Apple hard- and software delighted me. It was expensive but the cost could be justified.
Today, Apple hardware gets ever more expensive while adding ever less value for me. With the recent push towards growing service revenue, I fear Apple is going to betray parts of their original DNA.
I usually never invoke this, but in this context it feels justified: this would have been impossible with Steve Jobs alive. He would have shut this shit down with a vengeance.
Despite being a capitalist with every fibre of his being, he knew where not to go, which line not to cross. If done anyway, in error, he reversed course immediately. I don’t see even a faint shadow of this in Tim Cook.
This general trend of deteriorating UX in widespread services is extremely exhausting and depressing.
The accuracy you could get with Google searches in 2005-2010-ish was amazing. Knowing how to Google was a secret weapon of computer literacy, you could find anything. Now I save links on a small server (I work on many machines) unless something is posted here on HN, as it's one of increasingly few places where I can search and actually find things.
Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become an exercise in self flagellation.
I don't know if it was Netflix that started the ball on nonsensical, avant garde categories followed by thousands of auto-playing calls to action, but combined with intrusive ads and obfuscation the day-to-day experience on mainstream internet really sucks the joy out of whatever amazing content that lurks in the cracks of what is actually a set of amazingly marvelous technology.
> Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become an exercise in self flagellation.
This so much, I don't know what's wrong with Youtube search, but on desktop it gives me like 10/20 genuine results then a block of suggestions and no other results.
I came to the conclusion that some PO and data guy figured out that if instead of me seeing what I want and leaving they can hook me on some Youtube journey they'll make more money.
> instead of me seeing what I want and leaving they can hook me on some Youtube journey they'll make more money
This sounds so stupid, but it makes a lot of sense and explains so many issues. Why make you click on the video X that you were looking for instead of sending you on a 1 hour rabbit-hole, bonus points if at the end you even had forgotten what you were looking for.
I firmly believe (as in assuming, no proof) that it was both a cost saving measure and what you describe as increasing revenue - think about it in terms of statistics, if you give the user the most relevant videos as the top 5 suggestions, you can cut down the cost of a query substantially and so cheaply so that you spend micro-cents per query, whereas before you'd arbitrarily cut off search results related to the user query after ~50 pages or potentially more, costing maybe thousanths-cents per query
The new scenario gets you the user conversion to a watched video and subsequently to a relevant ad, all the way to the 95th percentile, and maybe even 99th percentile conversion, at a fraction of the cost, and doubled with the fact that the extremely relevant result got the user to a video, got more monetization as a result. Your cost is then simply the query time to the cheap edge model, and then the search that provides the most relevant videos to search top-n (in this case 5)
It's not working for some people - but who cares, you hit 99th percentile of all users and you've cut down the spending of a black hole that YouTube is, in fact you might've even made the experience better for 99% of users.
I have nothing to substantiate my claims, but knowing how I'd reason about it, this would be my assumption for the state YouTube search is in
I also hate this and it has made me move away from YouTube search, unfortunately YouTube recommended is quite good at giving me relevant videos to myself
> Knowing how to Google was a secret weapon of computer literacy
I think it is still a matter of knowing the right techniques. You’ll hear people recommend features like `site:` and such (which are great), but really it’s a matter of learning and adapting to how to phrase queries for Google. It’s still a skill.
The default experience is far worse than it used to be. A common situation is I'll search for a 3-4 word phrase and the top results contain one of those words. If I'm really lucky Google will have attempted to match some terrible synonym of the other words, but frequently it doesn't even do that!
If you put everything in quotes, it's better, but there's so much SEO spam in the first page of results. I can't remember the last time I found anything really interesting with Google, for software development it's basically just a mediocre way to search Stack Overflow, GitHub, and MSDN. It's depressing.
Most of the old tricks don't work anymore. Instead of using operators and syntax to refine results, now one needs to rephrase their question, which is far more subjective and imprecise. It's no longer tailored for the searcher.
The old adage that if your not paying, your definitely not the customer still holds true. If you are paying, but at an affordable consumer rate, your likely still not entirely the main customer, especially for anything as complex as search over the entire internet.
I'm gonna go out and assert that the statement "if you're not paying, you're the product" has never been true on a large scale. Rather, the two are unrelated. In this day and age, you are always the product, whether you're paying or not. And back in the 2000s when I first started hearing that adage, it was only true on the most transparently awful platforms. It was really just a thought-terminating cliche meant to shush anyone who bothered to complain about a free website doing something bad. The difference between then and now is that we now know how to monetize somebody's data in a way that solo startup founders in the early 2000s didn't. Sure the science probably existed, but it wasn't obvious to somebody making a website that that was how you make money.
Nowadays, the process of converting daily active users into monetizable data is trivial, so that's what everybody does, again regardless of whether or not you paid. When you think about the economics of it, your value as a commodity does not decrease just because you paid for something. No matter how much you pay for your subscription, your data is always valuable, and the only reason Netflix doesn't force ads on all their subscribers is because it'd look bad for them. But behind the scenes, do you really think they're not selling your interaction data just because you subscribe to the most expensive package? Monetizing users has always been a function of ease of implementation, not the out-of-pocket expense of the user.
I think this was implicit in my second sentence: "If you are paying, but at an affordable consumer rate, your likely still not entirely the main customer, especially for anything as complex as search over the entire internet."
I didn't mean to contradict you, just elaborating on it a little more and taking it in a slightly different direction. I think even with your caveat, there's still an implicit belief that there's still a relationship, however distorted, between what the user pays and what the seller does with your data, and my point is that the incentives just don't seem to work that way.
> if your not paying, your definitely not the customer
This is correct enough. "p → q" does not imply "~p → ~q". In other words, if you are not paying, you are the product. If you are paying, you may or may not be the product. The adage does not say anything about this scenario.
Google Search is completely dysfunctional now. I use Github own search (as bad as it is) to search for code. Searching for an exact code text (with quotes) yields no result despite having multiple results in Github; and these repositories are public.
I’ve been using Kagi ($10/month user-oriented search engine) for a few months now and it’s what finally scratched my Googling itch. The quality of results is almost like Google a few years ago, plus you can buff, nerf or even block certain sites! Goodbye Quora, Pinterest, Yahoo Answers and other crap, hello Wikipedia and StackOverflow results always at the top. And of course, no ads.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadSpam is bad. Being overrun by low quality ads is bad.
I don't mind ads when its GOOD advertising.
Sometimes advertising turns out to be helpful. Sometimes you learn about something that you wouldn't have known to look for that you really care about. Sometimes you're looking for something and find out there's a cheaper competitor product that's perfect for your needs. Advertisers love pointing these situations out because it makes what they do sound helpful. But they are by no means the most common case. A giant Pepsi billboard is not making anybody's life better in any way.
This is my point.
Advertising is not inherently bad. To explain that further for the back of the class, advertising is not inherently good. Advertising can be GOOD OR BAD.
I love catalogs from the companies I buy from, and I love their websites, but those are marketing not advertising.
The vast majority of advertising is at best a "necessary bad" (not per se evil, perhaps).
Good advertising (like, for example, catalogues from the companies you love and buy from) is, in general, desirable.
What is sad is how "push advertising" can become something actually desired - once you buy into a luxury brand, for example, you WANT advertising that reinforces just how good and sexy you are for having bought product.
There are a very small number of catalogs that people are excited to get because the contents are neat. The Sears Holiday Wishbook. Hobbyist magazines. Insane ads for 3D glasses and plans to convert a vacuum cleaner into a hovercraft in Boy Scout magazines. But these are needles in a haystack of recycled paper.
Non-consensual acts of violence are always inherently bad even when they are "provoked" by reprehensible acts (three rights make a left and all that).
"shooting people" with X-Rays to image their internal structures for medical purposes is generally accepted to be good.
Advertising that appears in Apps or Software I paid for is hot garbage 100% of the time.
I don't agree.
I don't want to convince you or change your mind but I believe that most advertising is default immoral with few exceptions. Of course feeling that way myself I believe that it's a valid point of view, and I do make purchasing decisions based on it. In line with the article's thesis:
> feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product merely for a bit more money
I too am surprised that as little as this revenue can be in relation to the hardware and app store revenue that they're leaning into it this hard.
But I don't think that is due to advertising in general being "default immoral". There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something.
As an aside: Accepting money in exchange for promotion without making it clear that you have been paid is certainly immoral.
I don't think bad products are immoral, just bad.
> There is nothing fundamentally immoral about accepting payment in exchange for raising awareness of something.
There's a difference between _paying to get something_, and _paying me to do something_. For instance, we can probably agree that paying to receive a stolen television and paying me to build you a television are different even if the buyer-side transaction characteristics are the same.
That's where advertising breaks down in morality. When party A pays party B to receive party C's attention without party C agreeing to be a part of this transaction at all.
That's why I say "most": sometimes party C is in fact knowingly participating. Maybe they get something in exchange for their attention (access to a costly-to-run website, or a reduced rate on an otherwise costly-to-print magazine). Obviously that line is fuzzy for something like the App Store where the money is going to Apple's margins which are kinda sorta part of the product pricing but clearly the price of the hardware isn't going down but Apple's clearly within their rights to set their own pricing and...? It's fuzzy for sure but I sure didn't knowingly agree to be advertised to on a device that I bought before they started doing this. And consent is hard to talk about in a duopoly environment as well.
Anyway again I'm not here to argue with you about it and I don't care one way or the other if you agree with me. I just wanted to point out that your axioms about "fundamentally immoral" aren't everybody's axioms.
If you have a 10$ capital to start a company and you allocate 9$ for advertising (and marketing), you're left with 1$ to build a shitty product.
It's a simple mathematical formula : For a given selling price tag, the amount dedicated for advertising your product is inversely proportional to the amount dedicated to build your product.
Online advertising is almost universally trash for me, and I'm not sure I've ever spent a cent because of it. It's always useless and irrelevant (no I don't need a car, or lipstick, alcohol, or iced tea, I'm super not interested in any of those). And yet, someone must be clicking those ads. I listened to a podcast where the (female) hosts said they had spent hundreds of dollars by clicking on Instagram ads for random products, and I was floored! Who clicks ads?!
Are you just trying to say that advertising only exists because "women be shopping"?
So, you would agree then that when the content and relevance of an ad surpasses some threshold, the ad is good and that when ads are "useless and irrelevant" they are bad?
As a child, I remember very creative ads for Smirnoff vodka; those would not be possible today because marketing budgets simply see more ROI in targeted advertising, which tends to be bland text search ads or ugly display ads like this.
The days of Mad Men style aspirational, full-page, high production quality ads are gone, thanks to Real Time Bidding ad networks that made Google and Facebook their fortune. We've been living in the RTB world for close to 20 years.
In my opinion, all ads are bad, and the world would be a better place if advertising were strictly limited to publishing product details in some kind of directory (think along the lines of a phone book).
I know there's all the studies about mere exposure effect and what not. Yaawn. It seems like the dominant paradigm by far is that no matter how shitty your product, no matter how much you hate your customers (and vice versa), you can just nag them into buying it with enough saturation marketing. I don't get how people just accept this uncritically as a law of nature.
Why can't the ads be for quality stuff that people actually care about? Everyone's so obsessed with tracking every aspect of my life, so how come they just show the same slot app ad to every single person regardless, even if I've never shown interest in anything similar in a million years?
I remember back in the 90s-ternet, I would get lots of relevant ads for products, sites relevant to me. I loved looking at and clicking at ads, since they made me discover companies that I enjoyed for years after. I don't think they did any of this modern analytics stuff, they probably just had some guy with a good intuitive understanding of a site's userbase and what they care about go on his gut feeling. Maybe we should go back.
Have a look at Idiocracy to have an idea of how wrong ads can be.
>The key struggle of workers is that of getting enough minority representation in corporate board rooms.
Like the problem with the Irish Potato famine being that Queen Victoria wasn't queer enough.
Here, things get more complicated because there were marxist movements all over the world, from Africa to Asia to Russia, and each had different motivations and often different goals.
In Russia, marxism was always about identity first and foremost, primarily the identity of various outcast/conquered groups: poles, jews, germans, lithuanians, etc. that were in the conquered regions in the Western part of the Empire - primarily the regions that used to be held by Poland. The abstruse economic theories served as a type of schelling point for a coalition of minorites against the Russian Orthodox majority, and after the revolution there was a systematic effort to suppress Russian identity and replace it with a new "Soviet" identity -- e.g. if you look at the list of Soviet general secretaries, only one of them was Russian (although there is some debate as several of the secretaties had mysterious, and in some cases, clearly invented pasts). There were explicit anti-Russian policies put in place, for example there were communist parties in all the provinces except the Russian province, which had no communist party, and thus no road for advancement except to join the overall Soviet Communist Party, but that preferenced non-Russians for membership.
Similarly when the Soviets drew the borders of various provinces, they explicitly made the minority provinces much larger, dragging in traditional Russian lands, even as they created local minority communist parties that barred Russians from participation, effectively meaning that 1/3 of Russians were living in an explicitly non-Russian province, even though often times they were the majority population in that province.
A good book that covers this topic in depth is Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire" - https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-Nationalism...
At the same time, Marxism in other areas had a decidedly nationalist tone - for example in Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam or other nations fighting colonialism. Here, too, it was identity and nationalism that was the motivating factor and not the economic theories.
Really class-based movements are generally limited to the "West" -- e.g. Western Europe and North America. I'm not saying that class isn't important elsewhere, but when you look at what animates radical movements throughout the world, it's almost always race/religion/language that plays the dominant role, and this is as true for marxist movements as for other types of movements.
>I'm a bi trans demi boy who is disabled due to anxiety and also the president of the society. Anyone who doesn't sleep with me is transphobic.
>>Ok but what about helping organize the proletariat?
>Ew, they are reactionary bigots who we need to deplatformed.
>>...
>You seem problematic. You're not allowed back here until you write an apology for the original land owners and sleep with me.
And Debian recently decided to allow non-free firmware in their official installation images, so the latest hardware should also be supported.
Gack! Why not?
If the computer is supposed to be a "bicycle for the mind", then shouldn't it be designed to enhance our thinking, and also to force us to "think differently"?
You have to learn how to ride a bike. It involves some scraped knees.
Do you want to place it smack dab in your living room? Or leave it in the garage, out of plain sight, and access it only when needed?
Tools like the command line and exercise equipment help improve capability and personal agency. Hiding either away pushes the default toward passive consumption.
I'd love for a company like System76 to come out with such a solution, but it is certainly an expensive, difficult endeavour.
The default shell and utter lack of well designed autocomplete or hints is a like a bad trip back to tape machines, punch codes and weird idiosyncracies from a bygone PDP11 era.
It's absolute piss and nobody should be dealing with it unless they want to for whatever reason.
1. It spits out mountains of cryptic gibberish when you use it.
2. It literally contains "Advanced" in it's textbook nondescript three letter abbreviation.
3. Without a fairly intimate understanding of it's hairy inner workings on how exactly dependency and package conflicts are resolved, it will fuck things up and fuck things up quite royaly. Matter of time really.
Case in point:
Linus from LTT removing DE when installing Steam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD3HAS257Kk)
4. In fact, I'd go a step further and say that it WILL fuck things up even if you do understand that whole house of cards, but you will atleast know how to duct tape your way out of it.
Again reminder: How exactly does this enchance "our thinking" in any shape or form exactly?
The play/pause media key automatically starting the Music app, suggestions defaulting to include content from paid services (hey that movie is available on Apple TV!), maps links only working with Apple Maps, searching for selected text opens Safari and disregards your primary browser, permanently enabled share menu options for iCloud and Airdrop.
Privacy settings increasingly spread out and opaquely named. No more central unique identifier reset button, but individual ones for each app placed in different submenus. Completely disabling Siri has become some sort of Easter egg hunt. Not that it'll actually stop the data outflow, though.
Aggressive surfacing of ecosystem capabilities such as proximity unlock by nearby Apple watch, wake on bluetooth or network, etc. These features were previously configurable through the GUI, but those conveniences have been removed and the features are enabled by default.
Local configuration profiles (a free, easy, local, and accessible way to configure your system) are being slowly phased out in favour of third party remote Mobile Device Management services such as Jamf or, of course, the one Apple launched not too long ago.
These new advertisements are so prominent and the implementation so obviously bad, that I'm almost suspecting them to be merely a distraction from the much more insidious tricks they've been pulling in the background.
$ sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app
This was a common complaint I have heard from those coming from Windows/Android and even Linux... It's unix.
Also, the play/pause key works with other apps. Other default apps can be set.
Many other valid points in this article and thread, but I don't know why people expect the default behavior of the play button to behave any differently when no media is playing. Music.app may have an upsell, but it's still a place to organize your own personal music library. No cloud or SaaS required.
Accidental music app launches by my pinky finger brushing the play/pause touchbar control strip button, well.. let's just say it happened more then once. Absolutely maddening.
Your command doesn't work. The music app actually lives at `/System/Applications/Music.app`. And since Monterey, I think, even sudo won't let you modify data in that folder because of macOS's built-in protections that cannot be disabled:
Even disabling SIP and booting into safe mode doesn't let you do this.1: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes
Unix has ads?
sudo chmod -x /Applications/Music.app/Contents/MacOS/Music
Secondly, on modern macOS you'll have to disable system integrity protection for this to have a chance of succeeding.
Fast-forward fifteen years, and it's a house full of HomeKit, Apple Watches (loving that new Ultra), MacBooks, HomePods, etc. It all works well together, so it's easy to justify ditching $DEVICE for an Apple product. And when Apple Premium (one price for all of Apple's services such as TV+, iCloud storage, et. al.) came around, well, of course I said "put that on the Apple Card, please."
The point I'm driving at is that a household of Apple products started with one simple purchase of a couple of music players. But keep up the advertising crap to the point that I'm loading a non-Apple OS on Apple hardware, and that unravelling thread might take the rest with it. "It all works so well together" is a blessing and a curse. I'm pretty sure that if, whatever the reason, we ditch the iPhones the rest of it goes with them.
And that was it. I switched everything to Apple. Anything purchased new for myself or my business was Apple. Windows, Microsoft, Xbox, etc. I won't even consider. The only thing I've used that's Microsoft in the last 20+ years is Github.
With their present moves, I know my relationship with Apple products will end with a similar sentiment.
I think the "FCK" made it super memorable.
https://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobi...
But ignore the device, and notice how the UI looks at lot like a Windows PC desktop of era. Now imagine that against even the earliest of iPhones. Ballmer going on about how the iPhone was going to fail sure aged well.
Later versions of Windows Phone would improve on it in a big way, as you point out, but by then it was way too late. Perhaps if they poured more money into it as you suggest, but Microsoft was already paying devs to port their apps, and there were still big holes in the app lineup.
My friend had a Windows Phone 7 device, which was 90000% different from what you have in every way, and not compatible, either.
Then they trashed that and tried something else that looked similar but was completely different. Just an entirely broken strategy. You can't kill your few supporters every single generation!
It would have been like OS X not being able to run applications from System 7/8/9 or dropping PPC applications entirely on the x86 Macs.
Phone 7 was really nice though, way faster than iOS as I recall it and with some cool tiles on the home screen.
Then they changed so apps made for 7 didn't work with 8.
That was it, the little developer base they had just packed up and left.
Let's just say it was like they hired a college grad to build it for a summer, then they built a heavy wrapper around Android UI libraries...so weird.
I think they were trying to pull a "dev on all platforms" but only years late to the game and with no real value proposition, other than supporting a vanishing small portion of users...
I’m genuinely curious since the software is so out of date I can’t even get it setup with visual studio 2008 on an xp computer to develop apps for it. Their are so many hoops to jump through and it maybe that the usb doesn’t work with it in the end that I gave up.
Free to a good home (as in, you won't just tie it in the backyard and never pay attention to it) if anyone has a hankering for an old HTC Advantage. Great machine in the day, I even edited Word docs on it (albeit, painfully), but I wouldn't let it anywhere near an Internet connection.
Not everyone can do this or will do this.
Apple captured way too much power, and now they're free to boil us all. They basically own American consumer computing and mobile business computing. 51+% of it all, anyway.
By taking moves like this, I think it shows the platform is too powerful a market entity and that the government needs to put restrictions on what Apple can and cannot do, and lift Apple's own restrictions against app developers and competing businesses.
I am a big Apple user (iPhone, air tags, air pods, MacBook etc) but I definitely don’t feel “captured” in any way. If their products start sucking then I’m voting with my feet and my wallet.
I’d much rather support the market driven approach than to assign this responsibility and authority over to the Govt.
There was nothing wrong with the desktop software model. It's all artificial process now. Manual review, no ability to deploy on your own ("release trains" shouldn't be a thing), unnecessary mandatory engineering work to meet new interface guidelines, required opt-ins to programs that further erode your customer relationship ("login with").
I vastly prefer the government to keep hands off, but in this case we've reached the impenetrable event horizon and need a Deus Ex to restore reasonable competition.
Companies should be free to deploy technology to customers without being unduly taxed.
"Companies except Apple", right? Apple you want to be taxed, in the form of giving up profits that you feel are excessive, but which only grow because more users and developers find the deal valuable.
I made a couple of hundred thousand dollars in the App Store. You know how much I would have made without the App Store? Approximately $0. I have no regrets whatsoever, and feel I got plenty of value for the 30% I paid (this was before the 15% rate for SMB).
It seems profoundly weird to say that Apple is succeeding in the market because they offer a more closed, curated, even censored ecosystem... so the government must force them to operate more like the platforms that users like less.
And it gets even weirder to say that in the name of freedom and free markets we must protect consumers from ecosystems that work the way they want.
You even seemingly contradict yourself within two sentences; if alternatives are viable, then government wouldn’t even need to enforce anything users like less, because they would actually be viable and real alternatives that are competitive. When people are starting to discuss government stepping in to enforce fair and actual competition, generally things are extremely out of whack already and in a functioning society and government that government would have already stepped in a long time ago. Alas, our government and society are neither healthy nor even have legitimacy.
For some perspective; the same people who tend to lament “slavery” of a very specific narrow historical narrative, are also the ones who do not see the obvious that plantation slavery was essentially the practical outcome of the communism con job, equally poor outcomes for the masses that the very few “more equal than the rest” benefited from.
So yes, in the name of freedom, government should have, prior to it having had been too late, severely reigned in corruption of the whole American and global system by organized, aka, corporate efforts to do that very thing. Because what is freedom but the only meaningful state of competition, your ability to decide for yourself over your life without others being able to, let alone being supported in controlling it for you.
We are currently in an extremely darkening state where people have been even so manipulated that they cannot even understand what freedom is, let alone insist on it being enforced. Hence, we are getting more and more plantation slaves turning on their own lot trying to fight for their freedom because plantation life is easy and fits within the constraints imposed by the true slavery, mental slavery.
I’m a happy apple ecosystem user. Maybe I’m a plantation slave and don’t realize it, but it doesn’t feel that way?
I know plenty of non-Apple users also happy with their purchasing choices.
From where I sit the calls to prohibit me from choosing an ecosystem that works like Apple’s are generally either from competitors losing in the market or from ideologues who object to Apple’s model in principle and want to force me to use systems that don’t work as well, for my own good , apparently because I’m too dumb to know I’ve been literally enslaved.
You’re not really convincing me here.
Not really an option with M1, no? I know various groups have managed to get something running on Apple silicon, but my impression is that largely this isn't going to be a viable option. I could definitely be wrong.
I'll let you know when I buy one. :-) Nothing but Intel Macs at the moment.
I may go back someday when I'm retired, with free time on my hands. Or when forced off the easier proprietary OS's by a thousand cuts.
Companies this large behave much more like some sort of octopus / slime mold hybrid than a primate and giving them credit as if all the moves are well thought out top down plans is rarely correct.
Then I bought an iPod with click wheel.
I fell in love with it from the minute I opened the packaging. It just felt like a device that a lot of care was put into. I loved holding it and it was a pleasure to use. It made me rethink Apple.
When it was time to buy a new laptop, I bought the 2006 black MacBook. I felt the same thing all over again, but now for my primary computing device. I loved OS X.
Fast forward to today and I also have a house full of Apple products. Just in my line of sight I have several Mac laptops, Magic Keyboard/touchpad, a few iPhones, an iPad, AirPods... over the years I've purchased dozens of Apple products. Not to mention my subscriptions to Apple TV+, iCloud Storage, Apple Music...
But Apple is increasingly a very different company than before. I now feel like they are nickel and diming me at every possible turn and it's no longer even subtle. When I picked up my iPhone 14 Pro at the Apple Store, I was in disbelief at how hard the Apple Employee tried to upsell Apple Care using hard sell scare tactics.
I doubt anything will ever change under Tim Cook. Maybe some day Scott Forstall will return in Jobs-like fashion and correct the company's course.
I'm actively looking into running mainline Linux on a Snapdragon 845 phone, actually: https://nikodunk.com/2022-11-05-gnome-shell-mobile-with-post...
So yes, Apple gear is ultraexpensive, does little, cable breaks and lifelong souvenir photos are locked up in iCloud.
Unfortunately, this is still a much better experience than the Linux or Windows world.
It’s only a matter of various companies having to do fewer dark patterns to win over the market, but that never happens.
Linux is like living in the engine room - fantastic if you love engines. Windows is like a mirror house where someone tried to renovate but left all the mirrors in, Mac is a pretty jail cell.
The former two have their quirks, but are livable, the later only if you like prison cells...
I don't think many people will enjoy ads in their prison cells, though.
This is a bitter pill to swallow in an industry that's thrived on loosely tying together off-the-shelf components and contracting out the rest to the lowest bidders to produce products that often barely make it past the line of "somewhat acceptable", because the "apple way" is hard, expensive, and risky.
I really disliked Scott Forstall being fired from Apple, and have felt that he could’ve added a lot more value to Apple’s products if he’d been around. Apple Maps is still terrible (outside the US and a couple of other countries). So it’s not like firing him resulted in great progress quickly.
Recently John Gruber had posted about it being 10 years since Forstall was forced out of Apple. [1] I’m guessing many others feel similarly that his presence could’ve made a positive difference. Now it’s Tim Cook’s ego that would block him from being hired at Apple again.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/31/forstall-10
1. Have Apple everything 2. Through an internship at Microsoft, get a Windows laptop and Windows Phone 3. Fall in love with both experiences 4. Switch to Android 5. Decide my next computer will be a Linux gaming machine
Over time, I learned that most parts of the ecosystem can be swapped out for alternatives that are almost as good, but without nearly as much vendor lock-in. As soon as you experience this, the value proposition of Apple comes into question.
They really want you to be logged in and identified across all products now and forever.
This all feels like a betrayal of the slightly rebellious, iconoclastic attitudes of the early Apple days. But untangling my family from this web of lock-in? Oy. You want to switch to Linux? My spouse, maybe. My 14 y/o, never. And even if I were to succeed, I would have a new full-time job as household IT help desk.
For every person who cares about avoiding surveillance capitalism, ads, and distractions, there are ten thousand who shrug their shoulders and keep scrolling.
I stopped paying to see ads when I quit subscription TV. I feel I will soon have to quit paying for ads when getting a new phone.
When they show advertising it's below the text "You might also like". Or at least they used to.
Unfortunately, I guess that the advertising infection will spread to the point where it is unavoidable. At that point, I will drop Apple and pray that there is a functional alternative.
Used to be that people chose MacOS/iOS specifically because it wasn't crawling with ads for dumpster-quality apps.
App Store search is abysmal
Mind you, I hate ads and am in no way arguing in favor of them.
For a while I've been thinking about the public markets and each time I arrive at the conclusion that the public markets can be really bad for consumers and bad for the businesses themselves. In the end the pursuit of higher stock value for share holders in the short term puts a company at odds with it's customers and it's own initial value proposition. Obviously an IPO is a desirable goal for founders, and maybe (very obviously?) more so their investors because it's a liquidity event and everyone get's paid, but I think for any one running a successful company thinking about what you shackle you and your company to by going public should be a long and hard think, because you're going to wind up making choices at the expense of literally every value and use your business purported to represent.
This is also why when choosing to make a startup, as defined by a high growth company designed to quickly arrive at a liquidity event (IPO and publicly traded obviously included) you should really understand if you want exactly that. I've watched at least one founder realize she didn't want that and that she did want to run a business for the customers and the value they were being provided and try to get off the train and it basically wrecked the business.
When I read stuff like this I'm always reminded of the line in Aesop Rock's song "None Shall Pass":
"Fine, sign of the swine in the swarm when a king is a whore who comply and conform"
I guess this was a really long winded way of saying, know the game you're playing before you choose to play it and know who's actually calling the shots.
You have a large portion of end users themselves that will never pay for the product but gladly use the product 'for free'. You have users that would pay for the product, but again, why would they pay for the product if it's "free"? This leaves the only viable products in the market as free products. The only model I know for free service is ad and data collection driven.
The business world won't be able to escape this trap themselves, it will be driven by consumer protections and data privacy making targeted advertising via data collection more risky at a legal/compliance level.
It's incredibly saddening to see Apple start to put ads in more things. It's not the premium experience I'm looking for (and paying for). I love linux for servers but I'm sorry, the desktop is just not my cup of tea. One things on the mac that I enjoy is the quality and style of most 3rd party apps that I use. It's a level of polish that I don't see anywhere else, at least at the same consistency. Call me vain, call me whatever you want but I like looking at pretty UI, I'm staring at my monitors for 8+ hours a day, I'd like to enjoy what I'm doing. An ugly UI isn't unusable but it adds a small subconscious "tax" that is real and does add up (at least for me).
This is the only way to feel about it: it's un-premium.
If I am going to see only 1 ad in a normal Apple app (Maps, Music, Podcasts etc.) Apple can kiss that money goodbye.
For every Apple Service there’s a good alternative. I’ll turn my iPhone into a piece of Apple hardware with minimal affiliation to Apple software within the afternoon.
From there on out, I’ll start investigating to replace my Apple hardware with alternatives at their next renewal cycle.
For Apple end users, Tim Cook is the worst CEO you could imagine. A human Excel sheet.
I suppose we could simply blame the entire customer base of Apple, but that seems less than productive.
And it is his job to explain to them that plastering ads all over the UI is going to destroy the entire privacy-conscious image that Apple has built up over the past decade, specially the past five or so years.
You can't just say "There was no alternative but to show ads", it's a reductio ad (lol) absurdum by which you can excuse any bad decisions that a CEO makes by saying "Well, the board made them do it".
First, no. That's a gross oversimplification of the situation, and there are thousands of counter-examples. It's one of those things people see on HN and then pass along as if it was the absolute truth. It isn't.
But, for fun, let's pretend it is true. Then the way Tim Cook answers to shareholders is to preserve the long-term value of Apple as a brand and a company, and not to sell out for short-term gains.
The majority of Apple shareholders are massive corporations that invest for the long-haul, not day traders trying to make a quick buck.
Don't open Settings, then. There's been ads in there for three years.
But yeah, it's an ad. At least you can dismiss it. Dunno how long it'll stay gone (this just prompted me to go tell it "not now", so we'll see).
Under Tim Cook, there is no possible way things will get better, and I suspect they will get much worse. They'll continue making whatever comprises to the user experience are necessary to obtain quarterly growth. And the more difficult that becomes, the more drastic and user hostile the changes will be.
It's bizarrely short-sighted, and I can't figure out why. I mean there are several videos of Steve Jobs himself warning about this exact trajectory, and I'm sure Tim Cook must have seen them.
No, if Cook fails to "stop" ads that's pretty clearly evidence he's okay with them.
Tim wants ads. Tim is a money guy, not a product guy.
I use Meet extensively across my professional engagements with GSuite/Workspace. Works great. No ads.
And then post-meeting popup ads (that are always on top until you dismiss them) like this: https://cs.joshstrange.com/BizVwE
I've gone through almost all the settings I could think of but I don't see a way to disable it. I pay monthly for Zoom and I'm logged into that account. I find it beyond the pale that Zoom wastes my time/energy in this way especially since most ads are about a product I will never use. If I need a tool to run a 500+ person webinar my life has taken a horrible turn, and if I did I wouldn't use Zoom since they do crap like this.
Damnit, Microsoft, why'd you have to ruin your OS with ad and spying garbage and shittifying your calculator and notepad apps et c. just as you were starting to add useful stuff like WSL that might have made it a viable OS for actual work and not just playing video games?
So I guess it's Linux. Ugh. Or maybe the FreeBSD driver situation will get better before then and I can use that. That'd be... fine, I guess.
Zoom has plenty of competitors that don't show ads after calls. Try a few out. Some of them are a much better experience for participants and hosts alike.
how do we ever break the cycle of growth at all costs demanded of public companies?
you assume that a country-wide implementation is the only way that marx's ideas can be implemented and that is a wrong assumption.
if organizing as cooperatives was the most common way to structure businesses (rather than a capitalist organization), then you'd have a different, arguably better society. in that situation, you can organize as a capitalistic endeavor if you want, but you'd have a hard time competing with co-ops for labor and other resources. it would be decentralized, entrepreneurs would still get rewarded, there would still be free enterprise, it would be a free labor market, etc.
Aside from a handful of RPIs, my entire family uses Apple gear. But for the first time in 2 decades, I'm wondering what a platform change might look like.
Considering my investment in Apple gear, even getting me to the "only looking" phase is pretty remarkable.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
-Steve Jobs
But unlike other products, this advertising will provide zero value to Apple customers. We already pay full price for our gear. We pay for Apple One. Unlike most other companies where advertising offsets the sticker price of things, advertising at Apple does not benefit us in any way.
For me, being free of advertising is a key benefit of participating in the Apple ecosystem, and one that I assign a significant financial value to. I absolutely hate it.
Yes it's cliche. That doesn't make it wrong. Steve Jobs was responsible for keeping Apple pure.
I really feel like an inflection point in human history will be Steve Jobs dying in 2011, right after releasing revolutionary products (iPhone and iPad), but not being able to be around to steer the ship and be the voice of reason and ethics as the products became more influential.
Steve Jobs once said (in the D8 interview I believe) that apps which defamed people were not allowed on the App Store. I wonder how he would feel about social media today, Twitter in particular.
He would have had the courage, power, and conviction to fight against some of the things happening today, in terms of widespread outrage culture, slandering and libel, cancel culture, etc.
I guess we'll never know.
> Steve Jobs
> the voice of reason and ethics
Honestly, I never expected to see that in one sentence.
Just remember how he said that Apple is not interested in games. It was somewhat of a shocker since they would lose so much clients because of that but look where we are now. The Apple Arcade and other pathetic attempts just proves how right he was. Why enter a market where your results will be laughably bad? It is pathetic how they present "Lara Croft Tomb Raider" which is 4+ year old game benchmarks in 2022 on 1080p 60fps and 4k 30fps as if it's somehow good.
And remember the cringe moment where they presented Touch Bar with some DJ? Jesus...
They may not be publishing games for hardcode gamers, but there are some great indie titles, and it's the only place on the App Store I let my kids have free reign to download what they like, knowing that they will never see an ad or be lured into some grindy game mechanic to tempt them into an in-app purchase
Wouldn't it make more sense to pay indie developers instead of Apple? Apple could still offer a curated list to promote their hardware etc. but in the store front setup it looks like the only "innovation" they made was tax.
- No ads
- No in app purchase
- Curating a collection of good games to include on the platform
Apple does pay the developers for being on Apple Arcade. Including funding the development of bespoke titles, as well as ongoing payments for the duration the game is listed on the Arcade service.
Their gear is too good: I'm on year 4 with my Watch, my iPad is 3 or 4 years old, and the only reason I upgrade my iPhone every couple of years is for the camera.
And there just aren't that many Android users willing to switch.
Dividends and stock buybacks are keeping their shareholders happy, but at some point they need a growth story, and the iPhone set an incredible bar to hurdle.
(I'm not defending their ad business, to be clear, but it's hardly shocking that they're trying to find something to bring in new revenue.)
Today, Apple hardware gets ever more expensive while adding ever less value for me. With the recent push towards growing service revenue, I fear Apple is going to betray parts of their original DNA.
I usually never invoke this, but in this context it feels justified: this would have been impossible with Steve Jobs alive. He would have shut this shit down with a vengeance.
Despite being a capitalist with every fibre of his being, he knew where not to go, which line not to cross. If done anyway, in error, he reversed course immediately. I don’t see even a faint shadow of this in Tim Cook.
The accuracy you could get with Google searches in 2005-2010-ish was amazing. Knowing how to Google was a secret weapon of computer literacy, you could find anything. Now I save links on a small server (I work on many machines) unless something is posted here on HN, as it's one of increasingly few places where I can search and actually find things.
Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become an exercise in self flagellation.
I don't know if it was Netflix that started the ball on nonsensical, avant garde categories followed by thousands of auto-playing calls to action, but combined with intrusive ads and obfuscation the day-to-day experience on mainstream internet really sucks the joy out of whatever amazing content that lurks in the cracks of what is actually a set of amazingly marvelous technology.
This so much, I don't know what's wrong with Youtube search, but on desktop it gives me like 10/20 genuine results then a block of suggestions and no other results.
I came to the conclusion that some PO and data guy figured out that if instead of me seeing what I want and leaving they can hook me on some Youtube journey they'll make more money.
This sounds so stupid, but it makes a lot of sense and explains so many issues. Why make you click on the video X that you were looking for instead of sending you on a 1 hour rabbit-hole, bonus points if at the end you even had forgotten what you were looking for.
The new scenario gets you the user conversion to a watched video and subsequently to a relevant ad, all the way to the 95th percentile, and maybe even 99th percentile conversion, at a fraction of the cost, and doubled with the fact that the extremely relevant result got the user to a video, got more monetization as a result. Your cost is then simply the query time to the cheap edge model, and then the search that provides the most relevant videos to search top-n (in this case 5)
It's not working for some people - but who cares, you hit 99th percentile of all users and you've cut down the spending of a black hole that YouTube is, in fact you might've even made the experience better for 99% of users. I have nothing to substantiate my claims, but knowing how I'd reason about it, this would be my assumption for the state YouTube search is in
I also hate this and it has made me move away from YouTube search, unfortunately YouTube recommended is quite good at giving me relevant videos to myself
I think it is still a matter of knowing the right techniques. You’ll hear people recommend features like `site:` and such (which are great), but really it’s a matter of learning and adapting to how to phrase queries for Google. It’s still a skill.
If you put everything in quotes, it's better, but there's so much SEO spam in the first page of results. I can't remember the last time I found anything really interesting with Google, for software development it's basically just a mediocre way to search Stack Overflow, GitHub, and MSDN. It's depressing.
Nowadays, the process of converting daily active users into monetizable data is trivial, so that's what everybody does, again regardless of whether or not you paid. When you think about the economics of it, your value as a commodity does not decrease just because you paid for something. No matter how much you pay for your subscription, your data is always valuable, and the only reason Netflix doesn't force ads on all their subscribers is because it'd look bad for them. But behind the scenes, do you really think they're not selling your interaction data just because you subscribe to the most expensive package? Monetizing users has always been a function of ease of implementation, not the out-of-pocket expense of the user.
I think this was implicit in my second sentence: "If you are paying, but at an affordable consumer rate, your likely still not entirely the main customer, especially for anything as complex as search over the entire internet."
This is correct enough. "p → q" does not imply "~p → ~q". In other words, if you are not paying, you are the product. If you are paying, you may or may not be the product. The adage does not say anything about this scenario.