I feel vindicated for when I said that the moment Apple's line stops growing, they'll resort to monetizing their users like the rest of big-tech to increase their shareholder returns, and everyone here was like "Nooo, my sweet innocent publicly traded trillion dollar corporation would never betray me like that". Give it a few more years love, now they're boiling the frog.
What do you mean start monetizing ? I get adds for their Apple Arcade trial on top of my iOS settings main screen.
I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
Ah, sweet vindication. Eventually the only company that doesn't do (all the) bad thing will start doing bad thing.
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
I think this is a lot worse than the U2 thing. Operating systems bundle free stuff all the time. Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
> destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, to get users to believe that it’s private. That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?
Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising. Companies ultimately serve whoever they make their money from; and none of the other big tech players have a comprehensive business model where the end user is the customer instead of the product.
And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.
The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."
So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.
I'm sure at some marketing meeting at Google, a VP racing for pole posiiton has wanted to green-light the idea of putting advertisements in their Wallet app.
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
While Google may or may not refrain from putting ads in their wallet app due to this incident, the aggressive ways that they use to get me to use the wallet app have been off putting enough.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
Google Photos, which comes installed by default on all Android phones, sends notifications asking you to print an album with your photos through a partner.
Did we ever find out what happened at Mozilla that allowed that trust-destroying Mr. Robot advertisement to happen? There seems to be a trend (n=2) of Marketing spending consumer trust for one-time media engagement clicks.
Not in detail afaik. The impression I got was that they somehow just didn't consider that people not looking for it would notice, and per the statement at the time (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/retrospective-looking-gl...) the review process was too focused on privacy vs the big picture.
I think a conclusion has been leaped to that is not necessarily true.
If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.
It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.
I think the article rightly speaks of "trust-erosion" in connection with this incident because, in addition to the showing of ads being subject to the suspicion of surveillance, it raises the question how seriously we can take a wallet app that shows ads or does anything completely unrelated to its designated and propagated purpose, something that is not the reason why this app is used and in fact detracts everyone from the intended use of this app.
The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"
> If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store)
Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.
> then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?
That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.
> it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.
The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.
> But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.
Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.
Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem. Everything from their ads to things like this are just in really poor taste, and aren’t something that they would have done 15 years ago because they would have thought it was beneath their brand.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
The whole forcing a U2 album onto people’s devices thing, which happened shortly after Jobs died, was the first time I, a former Apple fan, sat up and realized “wow, these guys are really losing their taste/tact!” Weird to think that was over a decade ago!
Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
Yeah. One thing I learned working at a Big company is that companies are full of parasites who are there to get their promotion or salary increase and don't give a cat shit about users or mission or values. Honestly it sucked any joy out of my life but I am stuck here because of visa.
Jobs was no angel, but he did follow "build great things and profits will come" philosophy. Apple these days is run for profit: profits are clearly first, and good things might accidentally come as well as a side effect.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
I remember when Jobs killed the Herald Square Apple Store even though the lease had been signed and it 'made sense' on paper. When visiting the location it's clear it's a dump and no Apple store will fix that. He put his brand before short term revenue.
Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card.
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.
Ads are planed to come to every single wallet out there. Card companies, merchants, and tech companies are working on this together. Apple just thought it would be a good idea to be the first to launch it. Soon it will be a norm and everyone will forget about it or even find it useful.
It has become increasingly clear that Apple needs a management housecleaning. Their purposeful antagonism of entire geopolitical blocs with anti-developer douchebaggery alone should have resulted in heads rolling.
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
Apple employee pre, during and post Steve. I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
Is this really that different than pushing an immutable U2 album into your itunes account years ago? "liking Apple" is a weird position; they're several generations away from when you could identify the company with actual people, and anthropomorphizing the company at this point seems wild.
Is that lack of competence, or lack of motive? Is it a problem from their point of view.
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
I feel like there’s a taste aspect and also a focus/discipline kind of dimension to it. For the longest, they’d essentialize everything almost brutally: like that whole thing about the iPhone coming with no manual since you didn’t need it. The design only afforded you one right way to find and do things.
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
I’m actually curious how they were able to exactly filter some of their less promising impulses.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
Those of us that have been long enough around, see this Apple like the one when Steve Jobs was busy at NeXT.
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
I'm glad that people are mad about this. I got the ad, went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was. I was kind of surprised.
For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.
> Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet. It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads, talk about privacy as fundamental human rights, and then have targeted Ads, in a place / software / services where no body expected it to appear. And not everybody has the Ad, so by HN / Reddit / Internet definition that Ad is targeted.
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
> It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads
What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.
What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.
The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.
From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.
(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)
Was this a targeted ad? Apple doesn't openly attack Ads - they are actively hostile to privacy invasive technology, which I don't think this runs foul of.
The problem isn't that Apple has ads, it's that Apple pushed an ad through Wallet. And in the Settings app. And in all the other untasteful places they spam with these ads.
Yeah, everybody is taking about the Wallet thing, but there is a giant ad for F1 in Apple TV right now that says it can only be watched in cinemas! WTF
As I've said for the last ten years about Apple and ads, as soon as the momentum slows down, they will put ads everywhere and sell your data next if it keeps revenue growth up.
Chinese phones are way more aggressive in showing ads. They have graduated to showing ads via the Live Activities feature, or push notifications with the Time Sensitive bit on to bypass Do Not Disturb.
There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s
I am probably not the average computer user. I didn’t even receive this notification, but just reading about this makes me reconsider switching my devices from Apple to open source software. I have every possible ad blocked and I have been a happy user of Apple devices so far. But this behavior feels so scammy and cheap, not worthy of a premium brand.
This year for the first time I started carrying an Android along with my iPhone. I've had Apple phones exclusively since I got my first smartphone in 2012, and before now never had a wandering eye. But the moves Apple has made lately make me realize it is time to make sure I'll have a ripcord to pull if I need one.
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
Interesting. I feel like this clause is violated very often by major apps:
> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.
I hope this impacts current or future lawsuits regarding anticompetitive app store practices. It's a clear example of the unfair playing field Apple runs.
A lot of companies violate that policy, and it quickly leads me to uninstall the app when they do.
I didn’t get the F1 ad though (at least not yet).
I have seen Apple abusing notifications in other areas to push their subscription services though, and it a problematic trend. It makes them look cheap and desperate.
Never knew this before - OfferUp is a huge violator of this where they will push notification containing only advertisements with a loud notification that is identical to those used when someone makes you an offer. There is also no way to disable those promotional notifications without disabling all notifications from the app.
Uber does this all the time to me. It’s so frustrating. I allow notifications from uber when I don’t from most apps because they are useful when a ride is incoming. Yet I get random spam notifications. I wish Apple would stand up for their own rules and do something about it but since they don’t even enforce this rule on themselves what hope is there
It would only violate App Store guidelines if Apple forces itself to agree to, and be bound by them. I think it's arguable that they probably do not, and so they didn't violate the guidelines because they're not bound by them.
you probably agreed to it in the 1000+ pages of privacy policy you get at the start of setting up an iphone. And there is not one checkbox for opting out.
I've always wondered why apple feels entitled to do stuff like say "privacy is a right" while simultaneously collecting enormous amounts of data from your phone.
I think back to the dan ariely investigation into dishonestly showed that disclaimers (like license agreements/privacy statements) are pretty much the gateway to bad behavior. it's like carte blanche to do whatever they want.
Resido - the app for honeywell smart thermostats - requires notifications to be enabled to view or manage your thermostat settings or run time history. This is relatively recent because I had disabled notifications over a year ago due to it pushing ads to me.
The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.
I got this ad, and ya, I was truly bewildered to get such an ad and then shocked that it came from my Wallet. I then spent the next hour searching how to disable this new marketing stream and it looks like nothing can be done. Anyway, glad to see I’m not alone here.
They have added an option to disable marketing messages in the wallet app..... in the new iOS 26 beta. which uh, really makes it look like they were not planning on doing this just this once.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadI really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
Lol I had completely forgotten about that, thanks for reminding me. Going to have to find a copy with that lovely MPEG blocky quality.
What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?
That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?
And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.
The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
"Privacy. That’s Apple.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."
So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.
It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.
The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"
Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.
> then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?
That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.
> it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.
The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.
> But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.
Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste
I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.
Without the huge hold of the cloud and business markets Microsoft enjoys they only have hardware.
And besides their excellent laptops you can forget of the existence of any other of their products.
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
Truth is Apple was always like that, but Apple in particular has a lot of fans willing to play the white knight in its name.
Sorry, having seen the sappy photo of Ive & Altman I cannot trust his taste.
https://in.mashable.com/tech/94502/sam-altman-taps-worlds-gr...
I realized it was official as I read your comment.
With Jobs gone, it still has a taste but it someone else’s taste.
That said, I think some people have developed their own original taste but some people’s tastes are just an amalgamation of the people around them.
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/p147sn/apps_like_yelp_...
For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44368854
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44371872
> Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.
What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.
Yes it is
You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.
Here’s a little game of insider Apple baseball:
1) why do you think the chief of design isn’t on this page? https://www.apple.com/leadership/
2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?
The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.
From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.
(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)
Was this a targeted ad? Apple doesn't openly attack Ads - they are actively hostile to privacy invasive technology, which I don't think this runs foul of.
The problem isn't that Apple has ads, it's that Apple pushed an ad through Wallet. And in the Settings app. And in all the other untasteful places they spam with these ads.
Ios26 specifically enables promotions in wallet which is viewed as a feature that can be enabled/disabled
I didn’t find it too intrusive, but it was surprising. It’s probably not a road Apple wants to go further down.
There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.
I didn’t get the F1 ad though (at least not yet).
I have seen Apple abusing notifications in other areas to push their subscription services though, and it a problematic trend. It makes them look cheap and desperate.
Have we not already agreed to this in one of the million TOS prompts that Apple shows us? sad
It would only violate App Store guidelines if Apple forces itself to agree to, and be bound by them. I think it's arguable that they probably do not, and so they didn't violate the guidelines because they're not bound by them.
I've always wondered why apple feels entitled to do stuff like say "privacy is a right" while simultaneously collecting enormous amounts of data from your phone.
I think back to the dan ariely investigation into dishonestly showed that disclaimers (like license agreements/privacy statements) are pretty much the gateway to bad behavior. it's like carte blanche to do whatever they want.
The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.