But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...
The problem with Apple is they make statements that they walk back gleefully at a moments notice.
- Nobody wants a bigger phone - iPhone Pro Maxes
- Nobody wants foldables - iPhone Duo
- We've simplified the product portfolio .. ahem.
- AI is bad - Ours is called Apple Intelligence. Totally different thing.
Think Different indeed.
Apple has all but conquered the high end of the market, but that ad revenue... it's so tempting... soooo tempting... just one hit...
What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/06/07Apple-to-Debut-iAds...
I had no idea this was possible and was looking for the list of apps with updates available. This is why I always go to the comments first!
That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.
Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
Source - worked at Apple ~2010.
In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.
There are enough examples until the NeXT reverse acquisition, bringing Jobs back, that prove it wasn't always like that.
The problem is the shareholders getting value from add adds now, while reducing the value of apple shares in the long run, by allowing a new premium producer to emerge.
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I bet they don’t see any ads, because their accounts will have the highest tier (or even a special one above that) of everything.
> tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option
Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
Glad I'm a Linux user and admin.
I think it really speaks to the situation we've gotten ourselves into. Capitalism requires us to constantly grow but I think the problem is we're myopic and believe we need to grow faster and faster. With the high concentration of power these companies have the easiest lever to pull is by making a service worse and having users pay for a better experience. That's a very different strategy than offering new products and/or features.
I call this myopic because it really only works when there's little to no competition but using it too much causes more backlash and causes people to get pissed enough to become the competition (and not sell out). I think Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play here. People aren't aligned with the goals of the organization. To be honest, it's hard to think of any company where it's clear the leaders, let alone employees, are dedicated to the goals of the company[0].
It's really sad too, since all these big companies seem to just be a shell of what they used to be. They used to be inspiring and it was exciting to see all the change and innovation. But it just seems to be more and more disappointment lately. Small changes so people can push their small org's status. No one taking any risks to really push things forward. These companies cornered the markets, have trillion dollar evaluations, yet act like they're poor. That boy ain't right...
[0] don't give me that nonsense of "the goal is to make money". The comment is about myopia. If this is your first reaction, you're being myopic and missing my point. You're welcome to disagree, but don't strawman
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
To be fair, I did in fact get a "Donate to GNOME" interstitial shortly after I first logged in. My agent was able to disable that without too much trouble. I find it obnoxious that GNOME gets to grab my attention for a donation just because they control my UI, while the thousands of other developers who wrote key parts of my OS don't get the same privilege.
That aside, I'm absolutely thrilled with the combination of Apple hardware and Linux software. I can see this being my default "mobile device with a keyboard." It doesn't yet work with my external display, but rumor has it the folks at Asahi having been making strides on that this year. Until then my Framework and Thinkpad both have some more utility as workhorse machines.
I suppose M2 is the most recent platform that has "good enough" Linux support from Asahi, but my M1 fits the bill for most everything I want to do on a mobile device with an attached keyboard. I might pick up an M3 with 24GB to replace it at some point if the Asahi team can get external monitors, GPU acceleration, and sleep working well on that chip.
They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.
[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html
[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck
Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.
If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…
According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
Apparently this is triggered by walking near a venue of theirs. Apple doesn't classify this as an app, it's a "suggestion". The huge sign at the mall that says "drink coca cola" is also a suggestion, that doesn't make it any less of an ad.
The App Store has had third party ad for years too. And the settings app has first party ads too. iOS is full of ads, it's the exact crap that users expected to avoid with Apple.
Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.
Ternus to potentially squeeze more out of App Store | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589193 | https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/09/06/gurman-schiller...
(Apple put "Ads" under the "Services"-umbrella)
It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.
After 3 taps and the thing still hasn't been done, Settings usually seems to stop showing the badge or reminder anymore.
And yeah, it drives me crazy. It's one more, wildly unnecessary, click.
Logic is one of the last tools keeping me tethered to MacOS. I've got 26 years invested in it, but the moment I open it up to record something and see an ad, it's over. Ardour and Bitwig will suffice, even if it means flushing tens of thousands of dollars of software down the toilet with it (the core suite of plugins I use).
I'm tired of unnecessary speed bumps in the creative process. It's why I no longer use a Roli Seaboard (what wildly awful software).
Apple continues down a course (addicted to ads, even their own) that I've seen few recover from.
I swapped supermarkets the other day because Tesco’s search now has several sponsors at the top of every search - and they’re weird keyword matching that doesn’t even work so you get nonsense products.
Search for ‘mint’ and you get 2 rows of toothpaste. Who searches for toothpaste by typing ‘mint’? Of course it’s bloody mint flavour. I want some actual mint.
I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.
But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.
AFAIK you can click them away.
It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.
I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?
there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible
but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.
The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.
Also developing for iOS which I did for a long time will turn you off iOS when you see how slow the apps are and how unreliable the OS really is.
Personally, I think iOS is a rolling disaster and its influence on MacOS made macs no longer worth it. If Ternus wants to do something. Scrap iOS.
I had a similar experience with promotional notifications from Hyundai: I suspect I'm not the only person who called their support saying, "I don't want ads from a $70,000 car."
Let's see if anyone listens.
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They're a hyper competitive (and often anti-competitive) company , and kudos to them, but it's odd that the community hardly criticizes apple to the degree MS , Facebook or Amazon for the same practices
I guess Apple is shooting their foot by selling their user data for ads because of money.
Betrayal?
Okay, probably not the Trump phone but all the other's I've listed make some pretty great (and expensive) options.
1. Can't turn off Siri easily, turns itself back on.
2. Apple search not things it should obviously being able to find, just like Windows search.
3. Ads in the operating system like Windows 10+
When you have willingly agreed to live your cyber life exclusively in the inside a golden jail, don't complain when the COs decide to collectively abuse you.
On another note, this ad is still being shown to people who subscribe to the iCloud service. It cheapens Apple.
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OSMAnd~ for maps, SimpleX + Orbot (and VPN for calls) for secure telecommunication, JRPN 15C & 16C for calculator, Collabora Office for spreadsheets, BravePipe (or NewPipe) for YouTube client, Silence for automatic call rejection (reject all callers not in your contacts for example, and regex/rules-based), ... need I go on?
But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.
(But, yeah, I'm reminded that I need to set up a Pi-Hole on the Starlink in the camper. I'm paying by the byte for those TechRadar ads.)
Options is all we need, and tools to customize them. And just like Blackberry or Nokia, they will learn the hard way
- Ads for Apple Care
- Ads for Apple Fitness+
- Ads for iCloud stuff.
If that goes away I will have no reason to buy apple.
But I don’t get to finish the article for all the ads on the website. 1/3 of my phone was filled with a banner at the bottom. 1/8 video player, and then a sign-up screen covered all.
Enshitification world order will lead me to use the phone less. So there!
And you can dismiss them.
Between always-listening Apple Watch, the upcoming cameras of Airpods Pro, Siri AI forced on us for functionality that doesn't require it, ads, them not giving a damn for obvious easy fixable issues like App Store search, and other shit like not adding step counter complication to older Watch models, I'm seriously considering not moving to Android/Windows, but giving up parts of the "smart" ecosystem altogether. Fucking expanding of ads are the last nail on the coffin. Even the few they snuck in were more than enough, the correct number of ads in an OS or app that's not a browser should be zero.
Started going to smaller brand earpods (maybe will even go back to wired except for gym), started to leave my Apple Watch at home also except for gym, and even for that will just go get a fitness band, and not buy any new Apple Watch models, and am seriously considering one of the "minimal" phones or even a dumb phone.
And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.
I’m not defending ads or Apple here, far from it as I hate what they’re doing. I’m just saying that while we’re used to privacy invading ads, not all ads have to be so.
The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".
Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).
I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)
FWIW, it's quite easy to get rid of them. Repeat three times: tap it, then decline the offer. After three times, it doesn't come back.
Also, they usually seem to be for "free" things, like 3 months of free Apple Music included with your hardware purchase. Or reminders to set up Siri or Wallet when you first set up a new phone. Or to install an eSIM.
F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.
I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!
All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"
Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.
I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.
In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.
I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.
I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.
Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.
The latest think I've noticed is that iTunes now advertises at one price but actually bills me at a higher price (79p in iTunes, £1 on my credit card).
If Apple behaves like every other manufacturer it will stop being worth the premium.
Welcome to my world where "Show fewer shorts" on YouTube has been clicked I dunno anymore how many times, it's an habit now
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True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.
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Are you fucking kidding me
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Asking for a friend.
When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.
> Think Different indeed
- Make the phone thinner
- Make the laptop thinner
- Make the iPad thinner
From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI, to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on, to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta, to the first modern touch smartphone, 1 full year before Android came out (and which made Android change its beta design to copy the way iOS worked), to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right, to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip. Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
Modern "services+ads" Apple sucks to the point that I'm moving away, but to say they didn't innovate is laughable.
When something is successful its all Apple. When something fails, its just that others dont get it.
Do you afford the same benefit to other people/companies? Why is Apple so special?
Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).
iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.
Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.
What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.
Or just none? I'm not doing anything special and the only ads I ever see are from some games.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.
Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.
Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.
A solution that’s just for computer nerds is close to no solution at all. It’s certainly not one I care to talk about. I may do it myself, but I don’t for a second consider it in any legitimate discussion about how any non-negligible portion of the market behaves.
> What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
I don't disagree with your main point, but the H is important context here
BTW, in iPhone I tend to get lots of ads because Safari doesn't have ad block, I can't repackage APKs, can't edit DNS, not to mention all the spam calls/texts (especially from icloud emails...). Thank God the ublock folks got an iPhone app. I mean it isn't a fair comparison, a rooted Android vs stock iPhone, but it's trivial to root a pixel and on an iPhone I can't even access my photos from a terminal emulator... so there's no fair comparison that can be made
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
I have had until now 4 Android smartphones, which did not have any ads whatsoever.
Like other posters have said, if you do not buy the phone directly, but subsidized by some carrier, then it might come with crap installed on it.
Of course, currently Google appears to make efforts to make Android worse, so it would not be surprising if ads would appear.
The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).
You are right though. A duopoly is rarely a competitive market, especially for complex products (it can be for commodities)
Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)
Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.
I never see ads on my android phone
I am on Android, I have no ads.
I use Android
No ads.
I feel left out, thank Dog for that!
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No wonder ad platforms that stay afloat till this day can have up to 30% of income from scam ads.
"Apps worth copying, already making money." – https://web.archive.org/web/20260923001345/https://appraven....
"Stop guessing. AppRaven(.app) shows you what people really search for on the App Store, what they complain about in the apps that already exist, and hands you a plan you can start coding today."
But still.
Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye or Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.
Even here.
Joh Termus was just picked up randomly out of a box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to checks notes lead all of Apple.
where did that come from? he's been at Apple since 2001.
I mean. John Ternus and other execs and senior management had nothing to do anything with it. They were all new, picked up randomly out of the box and only obligingly did the bidding of Tim Cook (or Alan Dye, or both).
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.
Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
Yup. If the main differentiator is gone, you move to the next marginal thing that matters, which in this case is working as a map.
A number of times I’ve been set to the wrong place by Apple Maps.
If you’re going to be served ads either way you might as well pick the more reliable tool.
For maps Apple has a lower quality product, that lets me down when I really need it, and has no privacy advantage.
For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.
I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.
I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.
This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...
https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...
Pantone and some sound partnership.
I would say it often feels more like a luxury product than an iPhone or Google-certified Android phone because it's not full of cheesy stuff. It's what iPhone and Pixel would look like if Apple/Google didn't want to push you: subscriptions, AI, movie/music apps, etc.
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and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
Pun intended?
You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
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Exactly, not "even", these huge companies have to squeeze money out of everything. To keep their growth rates up, they have to make bigger and bigger swings.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
> internal email from Bill Gates complaining about the usability of some Windows features. It’s old — from 2003
https://www.techdirt.com/2008/06/25/you-thought-you-hated-wi...
It feels like 80% of the UI has non-obvious overloads. I must have either skipped the tutorial or been too blind to find it, because otherwise these things are anything but intuitive. I've never struggled as much with any Android device, even with exotic manufacturer UIs.
I'm not a big fan of such gestures (mostly due to discoverability), but the few times I've used an Android without the navbar the gestures still felt reliable, even if I had trouble remembering them.
https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update/issues/19#issu...
This was after Apple broke the trick to prevent Tahoe update nags.
I looked it up and indeed, it's in section 1, paragraph C:
Your Device will periodically check with Apple for Apple Software Changes. If a change is available, the change may automatically download and install onto your Device and, if applicable, your peripheral devices. By using the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and install automatic Apple Software Changes onto your Device and your peripheral devices.
This is not to excuse Apple, just a useful trick.
In the App Store, Apple won't let you filter for apps compatible with your iOS version. So sooner or later, you have to manually try installing every search result just to see whether it errors out. There's no explanation for not adding such a trivial filter other than to annoy users on purpose. Without jailbreaking, you also can't install earlier (compatible) versions of a given app. And by the way, updating iOS eventually just turns into buying a new iPhone, once the latest iOS no longer supports your device at all.
But the worst part is how critical software components are bundled with the OS too. On iPhone, that means WebKit. So very soon your Internet browsing experience starts to rot, because the only way to get a version supporting the latest Web standards is to update the whole of iOS. Likewise, on Macs, your runtimes/frameworks are bundled as well, so you can't update them individually. Eventually, the only way to install even non-native apps is to update the whole macOS.
This is what you sign up for when you buy an Apple product. Apple has mastered the art of tempting you without letting you realize what's really going on until it's too late. Apple was, is, and always will be evil. The clue is in their logo.
Let's not forget forcing physical upgrades: a new .x update of iOS that suddenly decides a bit of hardware is now broken and bricks the phone. Apple Store said £400 plus to fix despite my explaining it was their update that bricked it - every component was working fine
That was my 2nd and last ever iPhone.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
(My own app menu on a 24" monitor at 100% scale has: "LibreOffic..." as well as "LibreOffic..." and the very useful, underrated "LibreOffic...". I also often use "KiCad G...", "KiCad P...", and "KiCad S..." but usually never "KiCad I..." or "KiCad P...")
[1]: https://ometer.com/preferences.html#standing-up-to-user-pres...
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
It's as if an alien made it, and they nailed certain subtasks, just because the requirements are simple and the path to something that works well is straight and clear, but the larger experience doesn't have many concrete requirements, and thus the road leads to something that does technically work, but which nobody* would want to use.
*Obviously some people like Gnome. Their brains don't seem to work the way mine does though.
Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.
If I force them on with something like gtk3-nocsd[1], then although I get my normal window manager decorations back, sometimes the client-side decorations have actual important widgets in them like menu buttons. When that happens, I end up with windows that have both kinds of decorations, and it looks weird.
For me this means that it's not nice to use apps like Meld and Remmina.
Just let me use my own WM's decorations please!
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
Peperridge Farm remembers.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
Same with X11 vs Wayland. I don't care which, I just want the one that works, and want to never hear about the other one again. Linux Mint comes with X11. It didn't work on my fairly standard PC because of something about graphics switching.
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
Simpler than that: money and control.
Marked up replacement parts for and the inability to compete because “not Apple certified” comes with disabled features.
The best part of market capitalism, no market! Pure profits because we make the rules!
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
Basically everyone is getting shafted.
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
Including app stores installed out of the box on GMS certified devices like the Samsung Galaxy Store (alongside the Play Store).
It just means they will be easier to install via the Play Store without sideloading (making other commercial stores more attractive but not really my cup of tea), and some minor API changes (although auto updating was added even before the ruling so not sure what else there might be).
Personally I'm not concerned about the changes to sideloading since it's a one time mild inconvenience. So I struggle to understand how going to iOS in protest (which doesn't allow persistent sideloading at all without workarounds) makes any sense whatsoever.
Google's original plan would have been really bad, but the new approach is a complete non-issue for me.
The whole iOS and Android keep copying each other and without someone like Steve being the editor they became pretty similar.
I want an iOS that is SIMPLE. And the software Apple is offering right now is anything but simple. Homescreen is now clustered mess. And for every banks, resturatnts all want an App for themselves, either you skip all the discounts and functions or now you have more clutter to deal with.
> The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze.
So you may be interested in GNU-like Linux phones with UI based on Gnome.
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.
The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.
There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.
I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.
Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.
The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.
> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.
In both cases the UX was search and sorted app list. Lean and effective.
Things like Asahi fix that.
There will never be a mea culpa from Apple because this has long been their end goal. Tim Cook made it extremely clear that services would be an internal pivot for Apple. It's a lifeline for their quarterly reports, a neverending frontier of captive users that all pay a premium to participate in status games. Apple customers might be the most lucrative advertising audience in the world, all Apple has to do is "protect" them from the bad advertisements and expose curated, trusted promotions that Apple users are sure to love. Then they sell it as part of the trust ecosystem, so that anyone questioning the value of advertisements gets called a malcontent that wants to force Apple users into an wild-west maelstrom of disrespectful, uncurated ads.
This sort of false equivocation "oh-we-can't-fix-it" attitude is how Apple kept their App Store monopoly, and it's how they continue to deny ecosystem integration to respectful alternative software. It's an insult to capable users and the core reason why I had to leave the ecosystem. There is no reason to pay a price premium versus Microsoft if my OEM begs me to Try the new Safari! or Get Three Months of <garbage you don't want> for FREE! My blood pressure goes up just remembering the stupid shit that Microsoft and Apple imposed onto "my" computer.
If you continue down this road of legitimizing user-hostile design, you will sacrifice everything you love about Apple. It's a Procrustean bed upon which good apps are hammered into service revenue.
That said, if that’s the direction they’re going, I don’t need to help encourage them. I deleted Apple Maps off my phone & iPad, & switched back to Google Maps after like 10 years on Apple Maps. The hardware I buy is expensive enough & has profit margins high enough that Apple should never be trying to show me ads—targeted or otherwise—inside the basic functionality of their phones, and Maps is very much marketed as a feature of the hardware they sell. Also Google Maps is just better.
TomTom is an extremely good paid ($6/mo) nav app - if you appreciate not being a product. It seems to now be named "TomTom Go Expert: Truck GPS" but does still have car mode. You _have_ to download maps, it's fundamentally offline. Routing is fantastic. They've been around since car nav was devices that you purchased.
The only area where it falls behind is finding businesses, but Google and Apple will probably always be rulers there.
I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.
But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that
So that makes it really hard to make a lot of profit - as the royalty costs grow linearly with your revenue.
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Same with my GrapheneOS phone. FOSS is a jewel to be treasured!
As for ads permeating our spaces, I think it's high time to implement strict ad control; the only place you should see ads is in the Yellow Pages, as listings. No more billboards, backs of receipts, outsides of shopping bags, not in newspapers (except classifieds) or magazines, not on websites, not on entertainment feeds, or anywhere else besides going to a directory and searching for a specific class of service or product. Also directories (stores included) must permit ordering by distance (strict, no algorithm foolery), cost, review count, average reviews, number of sales, and other criteria based on the data they collect; it should be as simple and reliable as sorting in LibreOffice Calc, with zero sponsored manipulation to advantage sponsors in the listings.
You'll go out of business without such Tom-foolery? Great! Your business isn't viable and is frankly a joke; go provide some real value instead you leech!
I doubt you'd see many ads in the iPhone Assistive Access mode, which can (sort of) turn an iPhone into a feature phone. You might also need to swap out a few Apple apps though. https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.
(Remember when MacOS and Windows updates cost over $100?)
Windows licenses still cost $100, and Apple's premium is well-documented by now. Neither are poor companies, both are simply greedy.
Please, elaborate. Because this sounds like a very thin slice of the whole story. Where in the Home Screen? How did it show up? Notification? Live activity? Automatically installed app? SMS?
iOS, regrettably, features ads in some places, but I have never seen (or heard about) any of it showing up on the Home Screen by itself and I cannot even fathom HOW that would play out since the only for information to show up in the Home Screen is through widgets, and those have to be put there, or they are shown “intelligently” (notice the quotes there) on smart stacks IF you have the “suggest widgets” thingie enabled—but then again this would mean you have the KFC app installed on your phone and you use it rather frequently so I don’t think it would classify as an ad in any valid way.
It's mildly annoying to have to do the swipe-down-and-search to get to settings but it's not an app I use all that often.
This is a solved problem and you are not utilizing the solutions.
Apple you paid a lot of money to already.
I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.
That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.
> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."
> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.
There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."
Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.
I hate ads, but mentioning other first party services feels very different than selling parts of the system UI like a billboard.
These service upsells should be dismissible but they seem fairly inoffensive. The App Store ads, on the other hand, are just atrocious
Obviously offering add-ons to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.
Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.
If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.
That's the thing, though. Those modal offer popups have been in macOS and iOS for a really long time, and does cheapen the experience like Microsoft and Google products do.
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Now if you are looking for luxury phones, that's a different thing. Something from Vertu would likely qualify. They are expensive and are made from high end materials, but the phones themselves aren't that special.
They somehow manage to threaten you that they'll delete your local photos...
To highlight Apple's innovation maybe mention things like the iPhone or iPod. They weren't the first devices of their kind but Apple's magic was always the mixture of the two Steves. Technical but stylish. But modern Apple isn't the same. The magic is gone
> From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI
Ignored because nobody cares or wanted it.
> to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on
Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
> to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta
That's a remarkable engineering achievement but that's an implementation detail. Backwards compatibility on the desktop was and still is tablesakes.
> to the first modern touch smartphone
Nobody forgot, there's always one of you to remind the class that Apple was first (by your own definition of modern touch smartphone)
> to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right
They were clearly the first to demonstrate that people did indeed want fully wireless despite HN's objections at the time.
> to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip
That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
> Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
I don't know anyone who claims otherwise, and for the longest time they didn't make their own touchpads. So much for being conveniently forgotten.
That explains why someone younger might not see the innovation. But that's on them, the innovation doesn't get erased as an innovation because people take it for granted. If the question is "did Apple innovate", then it includes all those cases, whether some moody Gen A cares for them or not.
Besides, that's not an argument. Apple still has many recent innovations. And we're talking as techies, devs, and products people here, and of various ages. Not just as "people who only ever known Spotify" and never bothered to learn the history of their field. Those wont know what Rosetta or a 5G chip is either anyway.
>That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
A, yes, all those classic Google, Facebook, and MS designed CPUs, that put a fire under Intel/AMD and set the benchmark for future laptop CPUs. You're being disingenuous.
For example roaming the city at 4am on a Saturday and trying to find some place with hot food. Google failed miserably at this. Eventually I found something but just because I knew it was often open at night. It was also marked open on Google Maps but never came up in searches there. Probably other places paid Google more for a listing despite being closed at that time.
Not sure how Apple does with this as I don't have any Apple anymore except a work iPad. It's too limited for me in terms of what I can install. But there's certainly some room for improvement in mapping.
Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.
There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.
"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.
That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.
"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.
If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?
> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”
Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
> That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing. "If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.
I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).
> If I create a messaging app…
Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.
I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.
> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.
You might if there were only two restaurants and both were really meaty.
Yes, there are more than 2 phone OS options but nearly the whole of the market is those 2.
Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.
Capitalism is the art of making your customers act like this.
If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.
The problem is that history has proven time and time again that it doesn't. While the homebrew scene for the DS was vibrant, even with the barriers, it was lacklustre on the GP2X, even without the barriers. There were likely a lot of reasons for that, but they all pretty much add up to the idea that not buying locked down products will not help.
It's no longer theirs once they sell it.
The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.
It's not Google that adds the code that makes your banking app fail: it's the goddamn bank itself.
But I agree with your point that the reason it sucks is not the AOSP-based system, and it's sad to blame the system when it's the app (or many times just Google) that is to blame.
It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.
Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.
No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.
The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.
I have a Samsung and I've never seen such ads.
The kind of ads they are talking there in the article would be in cheap Chinese phones in the Android world I think.
My Xiaomi has no adverts.
But then the Samsung S22 I had before didn't have adverts. Certainly didn't come with McAfee.
I'm on GrapheneOS, so they are not enabled by default, but I think on Google certified Android you can also switch them off. Also, besides that, if apps implement notifications nicely, they are nicer on Android, because you can turn on/off notifications per category/channel. Of course, some apps just put everything together.
I was horrified about how many ads my wufe has on her iPhone. I mean web ads in Safari. It's unsusable.
That’s just the internet isn’t it?
Not sure we can blame Apple for that, but I’m sure they could cook up a decent blocker if they wanted.
They could easily resolve that by allowing alternate browsers, but choose not to.
About Photos: why not disable notifications for the Google Photos app?
Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.
You can get shirts tailored (bespoke, not MTM!) for well under $100 in Istanbul, around $150 in Hongkong, and about $200 in Mexico City.
So why pay to be a walking advertisement for some European brand conglomerate?
Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.
Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?
If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?
It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.
Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.
Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.
Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.
Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.
The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.
Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.
The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.
The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.
Some MBA poisoned it?
"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.
It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?
The more we can isolate consumers the less they will care about others and the less of a point complaining.
It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension
Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.
Worth noting that this is what most of the live service gaming industry is doing.
But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.
I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
Sorry, but no.
I also have an iPhone for $REASONS. Both my prior iPhone Air and my new iPhone 18 Pro still frequently stutters. Even scrolling some settings screens (which are very simple), I can often see frames getting dropped. Apple apps like the App Store are one huge frame-dropfest (even if you let it preload all assets). Apple can't get a nearly 1500 Euro phone with the fastest single-core performance and probably the fastest GPU to render normal window chrome smoothly anymore.
My P10P with GrapheneOS, which only has a midrange SoC by modern standards (don't believe what Google tells you) and it is buttery smooth.
iOS got even more terrible with Liquid Glass, so many things are badly readable, even with the slider set to completely opaque in iOS 27.
iOS used to be premium compared to Android. But Apple enshittified iOS over the last few years. Even most Apple pundits agree.
Since people seem to disagree because they simply cannot see it, here are two recordings at 0.5x speed so that even people who are not sensitive to stutters can see it:
"There's a high chance." https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117299954135808210
In other posts they've said they will be sold with GrapheneOS out of the box.
Even AOSP is head-and-shoulders better than iOS.
Likewise, no Android Auto
In any case, it is a fantastic OS with many of the annoyances of Android removed. (Scoped file permissions are fantastic, for example) If you are on the fence, I'd suggest giving it a shot. Replacing a phone OS might seem scary, but it is really pretty similar to use.
IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.
Cash is much better for privacy. The government, banking system, and countless intermediaries should not know how I spend my money.
So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance.
> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance
I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.
[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371
"Moving from cash to credit cards, PayPal, etc. is an ongoing privacy disaster."
They’ve really MBA’d the crap out of that brand and it serves them right now it’s going down the tube.
Of course, I have nothing against being able to delete your own messages for both. A time limit within which you can do that is nice but I can live without one. But Telegram lets you delete every message in any PM conversation, including incoming ones, for both people. Or even the entire conversation, and make it disappear from the other person's list without a trace.
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All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
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I am still not sure if the joke was bad or if everyone takes everything too seriously nowadays.
If people actually read these clickthrough agreements and started sending devices back when they don't agree, it would encourage the industry to change.
No one "needs" an iPhone, they can support one of the open source phones with far less onerous terms.
> If people actually read these clickthrough agreements
I would live in such a world too, but that is a fairy tale. In a lot of situations, you don't get to see the contract before you have signed it. I had the situation in a bank contract. The bank clerk tells me it's mandatory, to sign that waiver, I tell her it's not. She won't sign the main contract, until I signed that waiver. I tell her that's illegal. Doesn't matter. After I signed it, I get to read the waiver, it clearly states, that it is not mandatory, and whether it gets signed does not have any effect on the main contract, as is required by law (with citation).
Because of these things, the laws says some things can't be established and most other things must be established with informed consent. It's on the company to ensure that this is collected. No, a tick on "I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions" is not informed consent.
Honestly, we don't need any law changes actually, because most of these things the tech companies do is plain illegal in every step.
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On the first page of a web search: https://www.legal500.com/intelligence/germany/privacy/german...
The Regional Court of Berlin held in a judgment of 16 January 2018 (docket no. 16 O 341/15, German language version of the judgment available here) that Facebook's default privacy settings and parts of their terms and conditions were invalid. This judgment provides important guidance on consent and transparency.
Background
The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (Federation) sued Facebook and requested cease and desist regarding some of its default settings and terms and conditions.
The Federation argued that Facebook's default settings violated the requirement of explicit consent. For example, the default settings included a location service in Facebook's mobile app revealing the location of the person that the user is chatting to. In addition, boxes were pre-activated allowing search engines to link to the user's timeline.
The Federation also argued that various clauses in the terms and conditions of Facebook were invalid, including clauses that provide consent of the user (i) to transferring personal data to and processing personal data in the U.S. and (ii) using the name and profile picture of the user for commercial, sponsored or related content.
Judgment of the Regional Court of Berlin
First, the Regional Court of Berlin found that five default settings were invalid because the requirements of informed consent were not fulfilled. The court stated that informed consent requires that an organization must provide comprehensive information about the background and the scope of the consent in order for the consent to be based on an entirely free decision of the user. Default settings cannot be regarded as informed consent if the user is not explicitly and actively notified of the default settings in the registration procedure. Facebook did not sufficiently ensure that the user was aware of the default settings. The court noted that a "virtual privacy tour" that Facebook offered, but that was not mandatory, did not change this. Not every user would make use of this privacy tour and "realistically", most of the users would not further review the privacy settings.
Next, the court held that the consent declarations in the terms and conditions were not transparent and therefore the users were not able to give informed consent. With regard to the consent to the transfer of personal data to the United States, the court observed that the user was not informed about which categories of personal data were transferred, why they were transferred, how they are further used in the U.S. and which standards of data security are applied. Further, the court concluded that the consent language for using the name and profile picture for commercial, sponsored or related content was not transparent. The extent of the usage of the name and profile picture was not clear for the user and not further explained. The court noted that the example that was provided in the consent wording (i.e., use for a brand that the user likes) was not sufficient information about the scope of the consent.
This is exactly what Stallman and the FSF have been saying forever, but nobody believed them, https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.en.html
Apple aren't going to document their planned obsolescence at apple.com I'm afraid
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(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).
On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.
Hot corners suck. They either activate too easily or they feel slow.
- You can't have the trackpad use "natural scrolling" and an external mouse use "normal scrolling" at the same time. The setting applies to all devices at once, so you need an external app (like LinearMouse) to use it.
That said, it's not like OSs and DEs don't have annoying things you need to fix (eg adding plugins to fix GNOME weirdness).
Okay, I guess, but that's a social wish about the preferences of others. It makes about at much sense as me wishing you just liked KDE. And at any rate it's not a technical or design wish that any software developer or team thereof can fix per se.
There are some people who could make it happen. Torvalds could distribute an official desktop Linux and people would probably use it, like how there's already one official kernel. Nothing would stop people from customizing their systems, but 99% don't care to. He isn't interested in doing that.
Worst case the code sucks but it's fine if I keep them for myself.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Not really. None of the "window managers" for macOS actually play the role of compositors on Wayland or window managers on X11. macOS has exactly one window manager, plus a bunch of apps that run automation against it and sometimes call themselves "window manager".
> This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Most window managers (and the vast majority of the popular ones) on Linux are also like this. It's called a "floating window manager". Tiling window managers are cool but they're marginal even on Linux.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.
And the weird thing is that the type of mental effort required is not even a useful one per se, it's more like a strain (to me) than something that makes me sharper.
Still some things are easier in a GUI while others in a CLI, just depends on their nature and how often do you have to engage with them. But after a while navigating windows by Alt+Tab (Alt+`) or the mouse is fine really. I don't care to reach for Super+PgDown/PgUp when I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and scroll to change the workspace.
Europe has a long tail of MNOs and MVNOs that don't support eSIM well enough. In China, SIM activation requires visiting a store, ID verification etc. so they only recently added eSIMs, and with limits: only Chinese iPhones can install a Chinese eSIM, and foreign eSIMs cannot be installed onto a Chinese iPhone while you're physically in mainland China.
The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.
This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.
My 2020 XR still gets updates and runs every app I need- uber, school stuff, office stuff.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
Edit: and rotation
And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.
Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.
No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.
I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.
Hilarious. But bad UX.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
But everything else I pretty much agree with you.
It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).
> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.
It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.
> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.
> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great
The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.
> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder
The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.
> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.
> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.
The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.
Yellow = yield (minimize)
Green = go (grow)
Makes sense to me.
OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.
That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.
Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.
What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?
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How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?
> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.
We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?
Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.
If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?
> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.
Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.
> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.
We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.
> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS
Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."
Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.
Have a look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_pl...
Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?
The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.
Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.
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Even when I do write code, I spend more time thinking about the code than actually writing so losing time to using my mouse doesn’t matter.
I was imprecise. I am solely talking about using a terminal emulator program on a display server, I wasn't talking about refraining from using anything outside a VTE. That would be pointless, yeah.
> there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
My point is that it is. Typing 'firefox' is way simpler to open the program, than traversing an application list and selecting it. The latter can become faster once you have a shortcut, but then it's equivalent to 'f<TAB>' or '!!' and the like. Language is more versatile, that's why we use it for fast communication. If you want the scissors from someone, you tell them, you don't make gestures or draw a picture, because that's way more work (unless you are mute).
I got tired of having to haul a separate HDMI display out for Asahi use.