> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
Interesting. I feel like this clause is violated very often by major apps:
> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.
Uber violates this. At least as of a few years ago, there was no way to get notifications about driver arrival without also getting special offer and Uber Eats spam notifications periodically. Not only was there no opt-in consent, there was no way to turn them off without disabling the status updates.
It's particularly bad when apps with legitimate time-sensitive functionality do this.
I denied the app the ability to send any notifications on principle, and now it's very annoying to have to check the app to see the driver status. It makes things worse for both me and them and I use it less as a result.
At the point in time when I disabled notifications for the app, it did not. I tried that. Even after navigating dark patterns, digging into the menus, and turning those options off, I still received promotion notifications.
Perhaps they've fixed it since? I don't know because they've already burned my trust and they've done nothing to earn it back. Publicly acknowledging and apologizing for this would have been a way to start getting off my list of bad actors.
Even if they've made it possible to successfully turn those off deep in the menus now, whatever dreamed-up definition of "opted in" it's operating under is a tortured legalistic one that undermines the actual meaning and spirit of opting in.
I can sympathize. I don’t know about uber in particular but it gets quite tiring trying to find and follow these obscure settings.
And what’s worse is that the companies always seem to find a way to reset it to what they want quite frequently. One of their tricks is to reorganize permissions frequently so the ones that allow their spam to get through are always new.
I had to completely turn off notifications for Instagram because none of the provided settings appear to disable the almost-daily "for you" and "trending" notifications. Now I don't get notified when someone DMs me there, which has lead to me missing important messages.
Same. And I used to work there, and I raised it with them. They have all their career incentives aligned to getting people to see spammy notifications. I was powerless.
The problem with the user hostility is that, in the long term, people don't use it.
As a web dev I see so many things that are lights-on-nobody-home about Meta. The Meta app on my phone generates numerous notifications, when I get one that says a game that looks really cool is 50% off, clicking on it doesn't send me to the landing page in the their app store, it sends me to the senseless home page of the app which seems to have the message "move on folks, nothing to see here"
The Instagram web application fails to load the first time I load it on my computer and I have to always reload. On either Facebook or Instagram I am always getting harassed by OnlyFans models that want me to engage with them... on the same platform where I engage with my sister-in-law.
When they say they are "careless people" I wonder if they are not just careless about sexual harassment and genocide but careless about making money because we're in a postcapitalist hell where Zuck could care less for making money for his shareholders but rather gets a squee from sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and hires people with $100M packages not because he wants them to work with him but because he doesn't want them to work with someone else.
I went through a couple rounds of trying to raise specifically this issue with support before simply uninstalling the app out of principle. They had their chance and burned it.
1. your profile icon (bottom right) > hamburger menu (top right) > Notifications > Posts, stories, and comments > turn off ‘Posts suggested for you’ and ‘Notes’
2. on the same screen, set ‘First posts and stories’ to ‘From people I follow’
3. back out to Notifications > Live and reels > turn off ‘Recently uploaded reels’ and ‘Reels suggested for you’
This works for me, but if you’re still getting notifications you don’t want, you’ll have to figure out what category/type they fall under and turn that off.
Yes, unfortunately, they have changed their permissions structure a few times, and each time I have had to go back in and re-configure it so that the ads don't show up. It's quite annoying, they seem to be doing everything they can to follow the letter of the law while disobeying its spirit.
It's interesting that 600MB can be perceived as both trivial (e.g. on a fiber connection this is a matter of seconds) and excruciating (e.g. on a rural satellite line this could be 15-20+ minutes).
I discovered this a few months ago - it's worth spending the 60 seconds to update these settings to get rid of Uber's terrible promotion notifications!
can't find what you're talking about. Per ChatGPT, "In iOS, there is no universal path like Account > Settings > Communication > Marketing Preferences across the system. That type of menu usually appears within individual apps or websites, not in iPhone’s system-wide Settings."
So does "Too Good To Go". Missed a pickup notification because I didn't remember having angrily turned off all notifications one day, since they don't have any more fine-grained option.
I let their support know, but they don't care. I guess as long as it still brings in more additional sales than it costs in lost users, it works for them.
This is something I like better on Android: As far as I remember, separate "notification channels" are mandatory there, and deactivating a given one is possible purely from the OS notification UI, without having to dig through inconsistent and hidden in-app options.
I definitely get unmutable notifications on Android from my first-party phone manufacturer bloatware apps, which is the equivalent here. Would I like to see the new Themes in the Theme Marketplace?
Pretty sure I've had marketing notifications on third party apps I couldn't disable without losing functionality, too. Separate notification channels might be mandatory in theory, but even if so, the Play Store is worse at policing that kind of thing in practice than Apple.
It's still fundamentally down to app to properly use those multiple channels even on Android; if they want to, they can shove ads down the main channel instead.
This is one of those cases where ultimately the app stores need to have a rule about it, and actively enforce it with hefty penalties for non-compliance.
Curiously I have the opposite problem with Too Good To Go - they never give me notifications of available things I might be interested in, even though I've set that I want them.
This is on Android though, so perhaps an ecosystem difference?
I uninstall even if I do not have alternatives, I install/delete Uber every time I use it. When I need a ride with them I install it, when the ride is over I tip the driver and delete the app. Every single time, no exceptions
Same I think I denied the wallet app the ability to notify me after this ad. It’s so ingrained in me that I don’t think about it anymore… if I see an add in a notification I just immediately swipe, settings, turn off
Why not just use the mobile website then? An app icon is itself equivalent to having a billboard on your homescreen. What is the app providing besides notifications that necessitates its use?
I’ve said several times before that notifications should be reportable as spam directly to Google/Apple, just like email spam reporting.
Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
There should be a public API, open to any user-designated program (including self-made, without requiring any special hoops to obtain any fancy entitlements), that can act as a "firewall" for all notifications (except, possibly, for few system-critical ones), allowing it to control and modify those as it seems fit.
Applications can interact with notifications on the user's behalf via the accessibility permission - I do this with KDE Connect. I don't know what the limitations are.
Last time I've checked, kdeconnect-ios was unable to read any third-party notifications, not to mention doing anything to them or modifying their text or appearance in any way.
Sounds great! Until your grandpa downloads a notification filter than really just forwards all his notifications to the bad guys so they can hack all his accounts
Precisely this. There needs to be an API that all apps have to use not only for notifications but also for getting your contacts, your phone's location, etc. that is spoofable by the user. Or better yet, an AI program that runs entirely on the phone and does the spoofing automatically and entirely on behalf of the user.
Let the enshittified apps' ads interact with your AI agent and steal your fake "data" in the background without bothering the user.
Also important: It must be IMPOSSIBLE for any app to detect that its requests are being intercepted by your agent. (If they can tell, they'll refuse to work until you give them direct access.)
This is a real killer app for AI but you'll never get VC funding to build it.
But of course you need a rooted phone, and rooted phones can't run banking apps, tap-to-pay, Netflix, Pokemon Go, blah blah..
The notification "firewall" is probably not impossible to make. I use Pushbullet, it mirrors notifications to my computer (to the browser extension to be exact), and I can already dismiss notifications coming into my phone from the computer. It should be possible to make an app that intercepts all notifications, analyzes their contents and dismiss them if they're spam...
> Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
Revolut are really annoying for this. I'm sure there's a few spare days In their development cycle for someone to implement it if they wanted to, but instead they keep everything on the same channel which is 50% promo shit, because you don't want to miss that notification warning you about fraudulent activity on your card.
We also need some kind of (privacy friendly) open rate tracking and spam protection.
If many users receive a new kind of notification, using a new template, with low open rates, and uncorrelated with app activity, somebody at Apple should at least give it a 5-second glance and decide between "false positive" and "needs to be elevated"
It would only violate App Store guidelines if Apple forces itself to agree to, and be bound by them. I think it's arguable that they probably do not, and so they didn't violate the guidelines because they're not bound by them.
Wouldn’t the guidelines apply to anyone using it who doesn’t have specific, legal, written exemptions? Not to say they don’t have it, but simply hand-waving “well they wrote it so it doesn’t have to apply to them” doesn’t seem quite as simple to me. I could be wrong!
The whole point of an agreement is that it sets out what parties will do for each other, and what happens if there is a breach.
Apple could already do things with the App Store without needing to agree to something to get Apple to let Apple do App Store things.
Apple is not going to sue themselves for being in breach.
etc.
Just because there's e.g. a license agreement doesn't mean you need to agree to something, if you are somehow otherwise authorized to do the thing. E.g. fair use, or you have a pre-existing right or ownership, or whatever.
No. Apple does not sign up for an Apple Developer account. Contracts with oneself aren't even meaningful.
This is a common tech enthusiast fallacy: thinking that law is code. So there must be some "if app published, there must be a developer account, and if the developer account violates the rule the app must be removed". It just doesn't work that way.
Apple has contracts with third parties to allow them to distribute apps in Apple's App Store. That's it.
The law definitely is not code, but the law could require Apple to follow the same requirements they set for others. Then the government could sue Apple (or otherwise enforce this behavior.)
This is the reason why anti-trust agencies don’t like this. Apple (with its App Store) is a gatekeeper and in Europe at least it should not favor its own apps over the others(i.e maps, payments, AI integrations etc). It should play fair.
“Fair” meaning that an app that was designed from the ground up by the same people that created the device and operating system should get the same attention as a malware-ridden hack from six years ago?
What does fair even mean here? Ensuring the advantages of vertical integration can’t be enjoyed by users?
While I am in agreement about the common tech enthusiast, or perhaps just dev, mental failings regarding law, I feel obligated to point out that App store guidelines written by the company running the app store are not law.
Resido - the app for honeywell smart thermostats - requires notifications to be enabled to view or manage your thermostat settings or run time history. This is relatively recent because I had disabled notifications over a year ago due to it pushing ads to me.
The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.
What an awful app too. It doesn't refresh the current temperature without force-quitting and restarting. Not as bad as my water heater app though. Couldn't get it to pair after 30 mins of headbanging, finally got through to their support who told me that the app usually doesn't work and they don't know why, and that I shouldn't bother trying.
Never knew this before - OfferUp is a huge violator of this where they will push notification containing only advertisements with a loud notification that is identical to those used when someone makes you an offer. There is also no way to disable those promotional notifications without disabling all notifications from the app.
A lot of companies violate that policy, and it quickly leads me to uninstall the app when they do.
I didn’t get the F1 ad though (at least not yet).
I have seen Apple abusing notifications in other areas to push their subscription services though, and it a problematic trend. It makes them look cheap and desperate.
Uber does this all the time to me. It’s so frustrating. I allow notifications from uber when I don’t from most apps because they are useful when a ride is incoming. Yet I get random spam notifications. I wish Apple would stand up for their own rules and do something about it but since they don’t even enforce this rule on themselves what hope is there
I hope this impacts current or future lawsuits regarding anticompetitive app store practices. It's a clear example of the unfair playing field Apple runs.
Lord help us if “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” and the remedy (or the portent [0]) is throwing open the platform to everyone to advertise this way…
That element of “well it’s different when we do it” is what’s so unclassy here. And, like… so weirdly un-self-aware.
And all for a coupon for a garden-variety movie?! The movie doesn’t have anything to do with Apple, other than being made on their dime. What a strange purpose for which to piss away your perch above the fray.
At least save this intrusion for when you’re pushing a magical new self-driving Apple Car or something!
You cannot possibly know that. Regardless of how many instances of infractions you know of you cannot know how many instances didn't occur because of the rule and you cannot know how the known infractions were punished by Apple behind closed doors. The very existence of this rule is what makes the playing field unfair.
you probably agreed to it in the 1000+ pages of privacy policy you get at the start of setting up an iphone. And there is not one checkbox for opting out.
I've always wondered why apple feels entitled to do stuff like say "privacy is a right" while simultaneously collecting enormous amounts of data from your phone.
I think back to the dan ariely investigation into dishonestly showed that disclaimers (like license agreements/privacy statements) are pretty much the gateway to bad behavior. it's like carte blanche to do whatever they want.
Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem. Everything from their ads to things like this are just in really poor taste, and aren’t something that they would have done 15 years ago because they would have thought it was beneath their brand.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card.
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) can only be seen as problematic in a world where steady-state businesses with steady profits are seen as "stagnant", and only companies that delivers (or at least promises) perpetual growth are seen as successful. Apple has been wildly successful. There has to be a world in which such a company can benefit from a demand spike without betting its entire future on that demand continuing.
A graph whose data ends in 2018 isn't strong evidence for "they aren't plummeting."
That said, doing some searches for newer information (e.g., https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/) suggests that iPhone sales aren't plummeting but are instead rather stable. (Although I wonder how much of that is services attributed to iPhone as opposed to solely the sales revenue from iPhone, the source doesn't make that clear).
Sales are accounted for in $ terms, not units sold. It's the same thing with Hollywood. You might think movies are more popular than ever thanks to record breaking sales (pre-COVID at least). In reality, we reached peak movie, in terms of tickets sold, in 2002! [1]
Back to iPhones, this [2] page shows their stats by units sold (about half way down). iPhone is essentially treading water if those data are correct (with a peak in 2015 overcome twice since, but by ~1% each time), but I strongly suspect that that's showing units shipped and not units sold, as iPhone sales declining has been universally reported.
Ask yourself the question of what it means when a company makes more dollars from a product while not increasing the number of units sold. It's completely obvious if you think about it for a moment.
The last time I bought the newest iPhone was iPhone 5. In the past, I’ve been getting hand me downs since most people change their phone between 12-18 months. I’m still using an iPhone X. I can’t upgrade the iOS at the moment so looking forward to getting an iPhone 13 in the next year or so.
I agree with you. Hand me downs aren’t coming as fast as they used to.
That's probably pretty healthy -- phones these days should comfortably last you several years. I consider folks who buy a new phone every year these days to be engaging in pretty conspicuous consumption.
which when you look at your device, it's cost and what you use it for, should not be all that remarkable of a statement. I mean, what if you replaced "phone" with car, house or partner?
I bet id buy a new car more frequently if cars were first invented!
As it is, I bought my car new and is 20 years old in great condition. Partner … I mean, who wouldn’t want to trade in for a new model if it weren’t for the social concerns? (I kiiiid I kiiid)
If you could get the same partner with more capabilities and less wear and tear with all important information transferred into the new one every year it sounds pretty appealing.
Screenshots, for sales, from 2nd link, i.e. what we are told to look to see 2021 < 2023: https://imgur.com/a/CpGWbWM
(although, my comment makes a hash of the whole thing and says 2021 is both < and > than 2023. Sigh.)
(n.b. not trying to be aggressive, or disagree, or make a statement about the overall premise that sales are declining. Just mildly amused by the confusion in the thread)
(my $0.02 would be that we're seeing the same general stasis that was presumed after the iPhone 6 release, but really, we just need more data (2021 was COVID stimmy high))
(but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018" because this is what we were shown on the Pixel team at Google, and a little birdy told me that's how Apple thinks about it)
> but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018"
Note that what was being claimed was that “Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting”. Whether iPhone sales are growing, bounced around a bit, or have plateaued is irrelevant. It’s pretty clear they are not plummeting.
There seems to have been a downward trend for smartphones since 2017.
Growth is either from an expanding market or an expanding market share, since it’s not an expanding market that leaves the market share.
I would image there is some substitution, with iPhones lasting longer on average it becomes more cost effective to switch to iPhones so they capture more market share. But if the general market doesn’t expand then it’s a fairly safe assumption that the new converts are going to wait before upgrading meaning that a decrease in sales is already partially baked in.
My anecdotal datapoint is 4 iPhones in 16 years which makes them rather cheap on an annual basis.
Edit: I had assumed that parent was correct, but as the peer pointed out iPhone sales have declined
Yep. And this is why “liquid glass” is the hot new thing this year. That’s basically all we have left to drive the refresh cycle that tech is addicted to.
It surprises me that this is what apple has essentially boiled down to. Yes there are people stuck in the walled garden but they were willingly stuck there tbh. They liked apple vision and felt different. But if apple is just going to lose on all fronts ("AI","vision?","This year innovation=liquid-glass") Yeah, they might not be in a good state..., Also most people I see want an iphone just rebuy old iphones and those phones themselves are still in good conditions.
Well, I’m pretty entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem because I value the iCloud integration between my devices, but all my devices are a couple years old and I tend to keep them until they are no longer supported (M1 Air, iPhone 14, iPad Air M1, etc.). In particular, I don’t drive my iPhone hard. As long as it can do phone and texting and run a browser and the Kindle app, I’m good. Needless to say, I won’t be upgrading devices for liquid glass.
Just like the new fashion season, car model year updates, and spectator sport video games roster updates. Change for the sake of driving sales. Has anyone done fashion as a service (FaaS)?
Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really.
Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space.
We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over.
iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude.
Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc).
One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.
Apple’s MO, at least in recent decades, is to let others blaze the trail into a new space, then do their own version that gets it right.
Smartphones were a big deal before the iPhone. People would talk about how they were addicted to checking email on their “crackberries.” But they were niche. You could see that they were going to be big, but they weren’t there yet. Then the iPhone catapulted smartphones from a popular niche to a ubiquitous product.
Before the iPhone, they did the same thing with portable music players. Afterwards, it was the same story for tables and smart watches, although not with the same degree of ubiquity. Arguably it was the same for PCs (“personal computers,” not IBM-compatible machines, of course) and GUIs, way back when.
What big upcoming thing would they do this with now? As you say, there really isn’t anything. Maybe VR/AR, but that isn’t even in the “popular niche” stage yet, the technology isn’t there yet, and it’s far from certain that it will ever be more than a tiny niche. Otherwise, what? Self-driving cars? That’s not a new market, that’s a product feature in an existing large, mature market. AI? That’s also looking like a feature rather than a new product category.
You're 100% right, Apple as a fast-follower "getting it right" tech company, and there's nothing to fast follow right now.
IoT/smarthome has been a niche/fad going nowhere since day 1.
Smart speakers are commodities.
They dabbled in an EV project, canned it.
They've dabbled in AR with the VisionPro but really it's too early, if it will ever work.
AI is software not hardware.
Apple smartphones/tablets/watches have essentially killed 10x more hardware categories than have come into existence since.
They sell a lot of headphones I guess.
The only consumer electronics I buy now outside Apple are basically higher end niche hobbyist stuff in for example music or photography. Nothing that would ever sell at the price levels ($200-1000) or volumes (billions) to move the needle for Apple.
If you are still using bluetooth headphones as they existed 10+ years ago, and haven't tried using apple headphones with an apple computer/phone, you are missing a massive quality of life upgrade in terms of basically never having to do the pairing dance again after your initial purchase.
You don’t have to do that with non-Apple headphones either.
The bigger problem with Bluetooth headphones is that the batteries are non-replaceable, so consumers are incentivized to throw them out every few years (just like smartphones).
Some non-Apple headphones can pair to more than one device, but there's usually a hard limit, and it's fairly small. And you have to set each up separately.
Apple headphones will roam between all Apple devices that you own, and it pretty much "just works".
Of course, as soon as you step out of their ecosystem, not only you have to pair manually again, but it can only be paired to a single non-Apple device at a time.
This is something I have said for a while. A lot of the fields they are in now are largely 'solved'. Not saying there cannot be improvements but we are well into the diminishing returns phase.
There is absolutely no risk of Apple going under any time in the next few decades but the era of rapid progress is over.
Things like Daylight could be really great if the software was more tailored to the device. And even then, you are right, I don't think it will ever be anything more than niche. It is the kind of product that if it absolutely struck a chord would be 10% of the market absolute tops.
Nothing wrong with that though. It is good to be a part of stable but solid market rather than trying to dominate it and fail.
What would be awesome is to have a double screen device. OLED on the front, eink on the back. So you could operate in simple mode if you want or use the sharp screen for photos when needed.
I believe the manufacturer Sharp is working right now on displays which will have both modes in the same screen, so no need to flip your device around.
That's like the people saying retina/HiDPI displays would only be niche, or that portable computing devices would only be niche. Good outside usable displays would revolutionize the world – especially in places that get a lot of sun. And Apple is probably the only company which would be able to capitalize on that with a "new" category of product. It's not different than people needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes...
Retina/HiDPI are almost entirely better than the alternative without them. The "almost" is just because of increased processing and power needs, which pretty quickly became insignificant. They took over because there's no real compromise. You pick the one that's better in all circumstances.
A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off. Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus. Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
> A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off.
That's not what I'm suggesting. We already have those displays. What I'm saying is that once they have the technology to make a great outdoors display without too many compromises on the other parts, then they have an entirely new category of device to replace the old, and to sell hundreds of millions of units.
> Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus.
You're arguing like you live a limited life, which I'm sure is not the case, you're just arguing in that way in the quote above. People want to be outdoors much more than just to wait for the bus. And approximately 100% of the people who work with computers would prefer to do it in a well-lit environment. Offices and living rooms are currently constructed to shield from light, to let people see their computer or TV screens better.
Not to forget the people who actually work outdoors and need to check blueprints, take orders, or whatever. Bring your laptop to the park on a sunny day and try to use it. It won't be pleasant for your eyes even in the shadow.
> see the screen a little better
It's not a little, it's a lot. Try comparing your phone screen out in the sun with a sheet of paper with something written or printed. The paper is much brighter.
> Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
They are absolutely awful, and you need to compare in real life with better screens or paper to get a feel for it.
This is why I originally wrote that Apple is the right company to bring this kind of technology to the masses. They understand that the general public will buy products that are great to use, not products which are capable of being used if the user suffers all the time.
I guess I misunderstood "needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes..." as suggesting we could have different screens for indoor and outdoor.
I often work outside in the middle latitudes when it's nice out, which usually means sunny. My laptop's display is fine in the shade. If I was desperate, I could use one of those third-party apps that enables HDR mode for all content to get it brighter than 100%, but so far I haven't needed it.
Which screens are you using outdoors? There's a pretty wide range of maximum brightness out there, so your experience will vary considerably depending on your specific hardware. A Dell Pro 16 laptop (picked arbitrarily from dell.com, I know nothing about it otherwise) display does 300 nits. My laptop does 1,000 nits, 1,600 with an HDR hack. An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
If it's sunny outdoors, I use an E-ink display. My Macbook Air does a maximum of 500 nits, but I don't think even 1600 nits is enough, which is the maximum a Macbook Pro can do with some hacking.
It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).
> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.
I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.
People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.
Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.
I said “good enough,” which is not quite the same as “good.” They’re usable.
Better outdoor usability is demonstrably a selling point. That’s why newer iPhones have such a high max brightness. And people will certainly like even more. But they’re not going to pay a large amount for it, or accept any loss of indoor capability. It’s not going to be a new category of device, just the same stuff except better in very bright light.
It would be a new category of device in the sense that a significant amount of current device owners will have a very good reason to upgrade and in the case of portable computers and tablets it would change completely how and where they are used. I think that's the main concern of the original question: What next great thing could Apple release to make an additional ton of money again?
I think regular LCD/OLED displays will become fully daylight capable before these specialized displays become high volume. We’re almost there today. My phone and laptop are usable outside in most conditions, but not great in direct sunlight. It’s not really the right technology for that environment, but the R&D money being poured into it is immense.
LCD/OLED displays are hardly usable outdoors or in well-lit spaces, unless you live in a very dark place geographically. They need to become at least twice as bright if not more to be pleasant to use, and by that point battery life and heat starts to become a problem.
But if they are able to make it, I'm all the happier. If Apple manages to make a fully daylight compatible device (whichever display technology), then they will have unlocked sales of hundreds of millions of devices. Because who doesn't want to get out of the cave?
I would say it’s simpler than that. Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”. As others have implied, with people like Jobs and others gone, there is also no cultural resistance based on core values that created Apple to push back on shameless debasement.
It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.
humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really)
the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang
we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops.
we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)
“ we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues),”
Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience.
China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products.
This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?
I don't think the obsession with the short-term is necessarily the natural state of people, especially not in leadership. There were buildings built in times past knowing full well that it would take decades and even centuries to complete.
But I think long-term thinking requires a unified people in a democracy, or a non-democratic system. Democracy in a divided society makes long-term stuff basically impossible when the next guy who comes in will just undo it to spite you. And long-term visions often come with short-term costs without anything yet to show for it, which can then be weaponized against you. Oh and the best trick of all is doing something with short term benefit and mid-term costs, and then blame the consequences of your own actions on the next guy in office. Excessive printing of money is an obvious and extremely common example of this.
> China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
I don't think this would work, they can't manipulate a sophisticated Western political system without actual sovereignty over the land. Western soft power is just that good.
If China had a playbook that could accomplish that, they would have used that instead for assimilating Hong Kong instead of what they ended up doing. They tried, but HK resisted Chinese influence HARD. So China stopped offering carrots and brought out the stick.
The west is very naive. A lot of the current state of the world is a result of western politicians believing the "end of history" theories of the 1980s - the idea that any country would naturally become a free market liberal democracy as it grew richer.
China is building soft power. We have Chinese funded teaching in British universities, lecturers moved from teaching a course because they upset Chinese students (who supported the regime), open apologists at places like Jesus College, Cambridge, agents building influence with MPs....
I agree Taiwan is unlikely to easily agree to be taken over by China, but that is because they know what living under Chinese rule will be like, not because of the soft power of the west.
The limiting factor to Chinese soft power development is its need to remain authoritarian. Folks will accept living under one if that's all they know. But if you didn't grow up with the brainwashing nobody will trust you and everything is transactional. You see Chinese attempts to exert political control over its diaspora and it never works as well as they would like.
Where the West's soft power essentially comes from in is in being the alternative to authoritarianism and it really doesn't have to be any more than that. The West will operate its own authoritarian regimes, like Puerto Rico, and Hawaii before it became a state, and the Phillipines, and these folks are perhaps the most oppressed of all. The West knows authoritarianism extremely well and is far better at the carrot / stick game of manipulating people.
When your carrots consist of patently self-serving deals to other autocrats at the expense of the public, the public eventually gets wise and puts pressure on the autocrat. The West can offer much more lucrative arrangements for all around, like that of building Taiwan's semiconductor industry. It's become a source of national pride for them and has created middle classes, a necessity for a modern political system.
I don’t know man, I would have believed this wholeheartedly ten years ago. But people are choosing true authoritarianism in droves. People just keep voting for Trump, Orban, Erdogan, and Le Pen. Trump is extremely transactional.
All of which is great news for China, and a great victory for their ‘do nothing: win’ policy.
I don't think authoritarian is the right term for critiques here. Try to define it in a way that one can't simply turn it around and apply it to people you probably don't want it to be applied to. For instance the actions taken during COVID, and against people during COVID, could easily be framed as extremely authoritarian. But then, like now, claims of authoritarianism were more of a proxy for 'I don't like the actions of this government' with authoritarianism just a framing of convenience.
In general the trends of the past were largely a product of globalism, and globalism is dying. So I expect we'll enter more into a historical zones of influence global status quo. For instance anybody who doesn't think Chinese soft power is growing exponentially should visit basically anywhere in Asia now a days. A decade ago China had relatively minimal influence, now it's everywhere driven in large part by just absolutely massive numbers of Chinese tourists as well as expats. A rapidly expanding middle class in a country of 1.4 billion has an impact that's basically impossible to overstate.
They always have. The present isn’t super special, and I think Europeans (speaking as one) realize this a bit easier, because we see populist governments rise and fall again, over and over, in different countries.
Populism is notoriously brittle, and almost every European populist party has eventually fallen once they gained actual power, because it turns out governing is complicated and can’t be done effectively while maintaining that beautiful, simple, enticing narrative that brought you into power.
But the Chinese government is not populist in the same sense, often quite the contrary. Their legitimacy seems to be derived from the fact that they have achieved real results for their population, which means they will eventually hit a different road block.
In uni, my friends used the phrase “simple solutions for complex times” as an insult for political ideas. Cutting the Gordian Knot only works well if your father spent half his life perfecting a new military doctrine for you. Still, it’s amazing how many people have “how hard can it be?” attitudes about everything but their own career/field.
Yes, it will surely all end in calamity, whether anyone here experiences it themselves or not. Humans have a major (among many) flaw, in the nasty tendency to believe they not only have a sufficient understanding of sufficient enough things, but that they also know the effects their perceived perfect choices and actions will have on such a complex system. Many religions have stories capturing this folly, the most famous possibly being the Tower of Babel, which were are furiously building in spite of what many humans call God, while others believe they have no more need for a God greater than themselves.
Orban just tried to ban the yearly Pride parade and inadvertently turned it into the largest protest against his rule ever. Trump barely took the election and may have even stolen it, if recent news is to be believed.
Growth is awesome. We're incredibly fortunate to live in this high growth era!
What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term. If you make an extra buck today, at the expense of losing user loyalty, that's not what any shareholder wants.
This could be a case of short term growth being rewarded inside the company. It could also be any number of other reasons.
> What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term.
Wall St growthbros do not draw these sorts of distinctions. If the focus on short-term growth ends up tanking a company, there will simply be another company to project its growth obssession on. It could be Apple services, or Peloton bikes or Subway sandwiches, they could not care less. Those companies aren't their customers; the investment houses, short sellers, market makers and pension funds are.
Maybe. But future generations (like yours kids) will have to pay dearly for our „growth at all cost“ mentality that uses up limited resources disproportionately and unsustainably.
This stupidity isn't leading to growth though. I'm actually shorting them because their inability to produce products that actually add value to their customers lives is already manifesting in earnings/sales decay.
> Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”.
This right here. The perverse incentives integral to public companies are at the core of so much that is wrong with the world.
>Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point
Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform.
Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26.
Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade.
So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base.
Google tries to maintain a large user base as well.
The problem Google has is that they’re dependent on phone OEMs to release OS updates, but OEMs mostly don’t make money off software.
They ‘solved’ this by pushing a lot of security and OS features into Google Play Services, so they can update them independently of the OS. Today, you can get new apps and OS features even on older Android versions.
I still have my iPhone 12 Pro that I preordered and got in release day and it still does everything I can ask of it, though the latest Call of Duty runs a bit slow, which is making me want to upgrade. Them not releasing a smart Siri that answers to more than just basic prompts is really hurting them and I can see why investors sued them. There's no reason for me to have to use ChatGPT on an iPhone, I should be able to talk to Siri like she's an actual personal assistant and not just an easier way to check the weather and set a timer.
If they are offering value add services, I'd much rather pay for them directly than have them subsidized be ads, sort of analogous to MS Office 365 (ideally with better privacy).
Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.
Unfortunately even if you're paying for the hardware, and paying monthly for iCloud, and paying 30% of every app and in-app purchase Apple still won't give you an ad-free experience.
The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit.
Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
On top of that, Apple users tend to be in the upper half of the income distribution - like in the USA iPhones are 55-60% of the market, but that skyrockets to well over 80% in the upper income half.
There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).
There is no evidence from Apple’s breakout of iPhone revenue that sales or “plummeting”. They are stagnant.
And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining.
Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.
You missed an important use-case. If my phone lasts for six years and I’m extremely pleased with it, then of course I’m going to buy another one. I’m going to keep doing that indefinitely.
2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.
Op said "if you started with a high end card". The GTX 970 was Nvidia's mid-range at the time, and not a great one at that. A 980 Ti or Titan X can still perform reasonably well for a 10 year old card. Even with the 970, the real problem is its low VRAM (and the 3.5+0.5GB fiasco). The AMD RX 480 8G which was comparable but with much more VRAM can still run most games, even if you have to make some compromises.
You absolutely can do modern gaming on it. I literally have 2 friends in our gaming group that are still rocking 970 in their desktops.
They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away.
Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.
And yet it can capably power many classics. Skyrim. Portal 2. Witcher 3. The same argument made above about phone hardware is largely true for gaming. The hallmark of modern gaming (and increasingly television) is sadly one of eschewing artistic creation in favor of monetizing eyeballs and the construction of social phenomena, artificial scarcity.
The comment they replied to was that a ten year old PC can do high end modern gaming. Skyrim and Portal 2 are 14 years old, and Witcher 3 is 10. I don't think a 970 could run Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
>I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for
What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
You’re an outlier. Apple has arguably the best lifecycle in the personal computing space in all of its categories.
They support most devices for 5-7 years, and have a strong incentive to do so as there is a pipeline of used devices into developing markets and their branding and segmentation means their devices have strong resale value.
With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
You're not responding to the case I'm specifically talking about. As new major iOS or Android releases have features I could care less about, I primarily only care about critical security releases for the OS I have. Why is it thatI have to install a new OS just to get a updated version of Safari?
Whereas I seem to be able to download usable browsers on older Android phones (with older Android versions installed) from the play store?
These phones are not my primary phones, so I'm less concerned with security and more concerned about them turning into bricks of trash sooner rather than later. A phone that can stay usuable for longer without any os updates versus one that requires os updates to stay usuable should get some points in that category. And it's been my experience that battery life of older phones are negatively affected after os updates anyway, as they are not the targete phones for new OS.
Because it doesn’t make sense with their business model.
My company had some ancient capital equipment that required windows 2000. We had a contract that supported them up until a few years ago. That contract costed a fortune, but made perfect sense for the use case. Nobody is going to pay to keep an iPhone 4 updated.
Note my comment is that you’re an outlier. That doesn’t mean that your needs are flawed, wrong or anything else. It’s just not consistent with the market’s need and represents an addressable market too small for Apple.
Sometimes companies do serve niche markets by rolling them together. Sonim, for example, made a fully waterproof Android phone that was rugged and marketed to public safety and construction customers. It also solved a problem for small customers like mine who had environments where traditional smartphones could trigger an explosion.
I don’t want a phone with design characteristics the lets it operate in a grain elevator. Likewise, I have no desire to operate a phone for many years, and the market, rightly or wrongly, agrees with me.
That's the bare minimum under the new EU Ecodesign Rules. Also for phones this is long, but for PCs/Notebooks this is rather short.
>With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
That completely misses the point that old Android Devices still get updated and recent Apps that work well, while Apple blocks their users from enjoying that. No more iOS Updates on Apple usually means no more App Installs/Updates after a short time
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.
Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design, and for everything else, a 6 year old iPhone can most definitely do all of that. I know, because I did all of these things on an iPhone 11 up until earlier this year, and I only replaced it because the charging port was damaged.
Congrats man, but that's not really germane to the point, which is that a 6 year old iPhone adequately satisfies the needs of majority of the population.
An iPhone 11 does indeed do all of those things easily. The only thing it lacks is LiDAR, which I would argue very few people use intentionally and was introduced the following year anyway. Camera of course not going to be equivalent, but still takes stunning photos.
That's supply and demand I suppose. As demand for lightning dwindles due to a decreasing number of people actively using devices with lightning ports, the price will tend to drop. That's not an invalid reason to prefer lightning over USB-C, but it's not sustainable. Production of lightning accessories is probably at or near 0 at this point so the oversupply will not last forever. Enjoy the deals while you can!
The cables tend to cost the same, way more than the cost of manufacture.
If you're buying them in bulk on amazon, usb-c is still more expensive than lightning, but the vast majority of people tend to buy cables when they have either lost, forgotten, or broken their existing cables. Go to a shop at an airport or train station and they'll charge you £20 for a cable, and people but them.
The "apple tax" is irrelevant to the actual amount paid.
Frankly, you might as well. It's an inevitability that you'll have to do that.
If you're talking about charging a phone, the usb-c ecosystem is literally never going to give you even a single instance of annoyance. If you're talking about lightning and laptop sized power delivery then, yes the cables need better labeling, but all of those cables are going to work for charging a phone.
I have an iPhone 8. It does literally everything you've listed, and the battery is cheap/easy to replace. My lg v30, with a battery replacement is about the same (albiet with a custom os since androids didn't get many years of updates back then)
> Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps
No, I deleted them all - other than youtube (premium, no adverts). I used to have them 10 years ago though so a 10 year old phone would run them.
> full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know)
I have a few games to pass the time in some cases, but a touchscreen is rubbish for proper gaming. Sadly some games I had (monkey island rings a bell) seem to have been removed.
> fitness apps
Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1, so I imagine that the supercomputer in my pocket can keep track of my heart-rate with the right sensor. I am fairly sure these were all the rage when covid hit 5 years ago so it's a fair bet they'll work now.
> connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example)
Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
> works with CarPlay/Android Auto
Yes, I had carplay in my 2016 car so any iphone since then will do carplay.
> has wireless charging capability
My 4 year old iphone does that, although I rarely use it. It came out 5 years ago.
> can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design
I have to admit I have never even considered doing that
> and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay?
Yes. It's face recognition so less convenient than the older phone it replaced which was a touch sensor and also did tap-to-pay, more like "double click, stare at phone, wait, then pay". Apple Pay came out over 10 years ago.
> Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Equivalent to what? A decade ago Apple were doing big advertising spreads about how good iphones were. I assume phones released 4 years later were at least as good.
Nothing on your list is a feature a phone from about 2016 didn't have, other than magnetic charging, and the 2020 era iphone 12 had that.
You're thinking about how you use your phone, not how most people use their phone. The reason people continue to upgrade their phones isn't always mindless consumerism.
For example, when you write:
> Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
You're already showing me how you don't understand what people are buying or why they are buying it. You're referencing wired headphones as if anyone besides a tiny group of people wants wired headphones anymore. People are buying AirPods and AirPods Pro - they want them connected to their Apple Watch so they can go for a run with them, and they want new health features that continue to be released for such devices.
Reading these responses reminds me of the "inverse Reddit stock pics". If I were to take these responses seriously, and I don't because they are nonsense, Apple and others would be out of business tomorrow because any old Joe just wants to use their wired headphones and their 10 year old iPhone is JuST aS G00d. It's rubbish.
Here's a good example haha:
> Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1
Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone. Give me a break. Even so you yourself said you're not particularly fit. What makes you think you know the first thing about why people are buying new phones or new devices as it relates to fitness activities or apps?
But are any of those things a strong enough motivator to warrant the average person paying several hundred dollars more for an incrementally improved device?
You haven't really made a strong argument for why a user might upgrade specifically and immediately for those features, besides that they exist. Certainly the average person is upgrading over time as components break or fail, but why is it that you think the average person is still upgrading regularly for any of the things you listed?
Nobody I know buys a new phone until the battery dies on the old one.
Are you saying that modern airpods don't do bluetooth? And aren't supported on the iphone 11? People have used bluetooth headphones for 20 years. Why would apply regress?
> Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone.
The point is it's software, which will run just as fine on a supercomputer from 2 years ago as it will on today. What features does an iphone 15 (14? 16? whatever) have that an 11 doesn't have to allow these features?
> The tech spec of every new handset camera is usually an improvement on the previous generation. But even this isn’t a guaranteed sales generator any more.
> “What is definitely happening is that people are holding on to their phones for longer. Back in 2013 there were 30 million phones sold annually,” adds Mr Wood. “This year it will be around 13.5 million.”
> Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”. Research polling 2,000 Britons revealed more than half are “bored” of trying to keep up-to-date with the latest tech. And three in four are no longer willing to pay a fortune to get it. As a result, almost a third intend to spend less on smartphones and other gadgets over the next two years.
The whole forcing a U2 album onto people’s devices thing, which happened shortly after Jobs died, was the first time I, a former Apple fan, sat up and realized “wow, these guys are really losing their taste/tact!” Weird to think that was over a decade ago!
They learned from this but still couldn’t help themselves. There’s massive full screen ads in Apple Music to “preload the F1 the movie album”. At least it’s a choice to load it or not this time, but it’s still extremely disappointing that people paying for Apple Music get shown these ads. I had recently canceled my Spotify subscription because of sponsored content in their app.
> I think Jobs makes the same mistake with U2 even if he is at the helm. But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
Perhaps, but there probably would have been more thought over it than just shoving it onto everybody's phone. The problem, I think, is that Apple is *mostly* run by white men over 50 - a demographic that sees U2 as the pinnacle of the rock band. They probably don't even realize that rock bands aren't "cool" anymore. I remember when Apple Music was first announced and Eddy Cue spent far too long "demonstrating" his music library and it fell flat even to the press in his age range. Usually you're best off demonstrating with "timeless" music as music tastes are so personal.
>But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
"You're holding it wrong" was about the worst case of "handling the fall out" that I can remember in computing history. Jobs was an absolute laughing stock after he said that.
Yeah, I don't think Jobs was well-equipped for the imminent era of Apple's complete dominance. You could tell he was confused by antennagate, bothered by media coverage, and wished everyone would shut up about it. He's the Underdog CEO, not Monopoly CEO.
I know that wouldn't be a popular opinion but I think you are right.
I do wonder that with Job's bowing out when he did may have been the best thing that could happen to Apples. The visionary made way for the logistic guys to let the next 20 years or so boom.
Job's departed just as most technology fields were starting to move into a more mature state, not entirely there but definitely past peak innovation. This is why I think the Apple Watch is the only thing that I think Job's would have absolutely loved out of Apple over the last decade or so. Would have thought Apple TV+ is very cool but risky, and be disappointed in the lack of progress on iPhone and might have down right hated the Apple Vision due to the hardware limits (bulk).
That album still shows up today in jarring ways in Apple Music when you use the Create Station feature because it was on everyone’s phones and their algorithm still isn’t good enough to recognize when one of these things is not like the others.
I agree that was weird - but it was never forced onto your device unless you chose to download that album (it would be like saying a particular album was "forced" onto your spotify when they are ALL available and free - this was just the first "spotify"-style album designed to be streamed not purchased).
It was forced onto your device to the extent that any other of your library songs or iTunes purchases were, whether that worked out to be streamed on demand or downloaded locally. Space was never the issue, forcing bad music in my shuffle play was.
I remember distinctly, because after trying patiently for months then years to get rid of it through official channels, I rage-quit iTunes when that whiny man’s voice started playing again the moment I connected my phone in a rental car. I still won’t touch Apple Music to this day.
For that matter, it still comes back from time to time all these years later:
Apparently, since they have taken down their dedicated removal tool from 11 years ago [0], your remaining recourse is to contact Apple Support and persist through upsell attempts to paid support.
Apple employee pre, during and post Steve. I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
Apple was fairly flat under Steve and meetings could have a fair number of interested parties involved. I can recall numerous weekly UI meetings with several of the people listed above there. Also note that Jony, Eddy and others weren’t always high level. Steve handed out his harsh comments regardless of concern for your level. Steve was a micromanager and was involved in anything that the user came in contact with and more.
To directly address your question, the answer was yes in that if you developed a feature, a demo, or anything Steve wanted to see, you would end up in a forum with a bunch a various levels of employees.
Thinking of C suite meetings happening when Steve was around cracks me up. Steve was always on the move, making edicts, rejecting things, walking into offices, having lunch with people, etc. There was no Jira, Confluence, Agile or any of that. It was a fight to ship by an imposed date or die trying.
>Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook
Yeah. One thing I learned working at a Big company is that companies are full of parasites who are there to get their promotion or salary increase and don't give a cat shit about users or mission or values. Honestly it sucked any joy out of my life but I am stuck here because of visa.
Until a company fully supports the combination of top-class engineering + top-class user experience to the exclusion and expulsion of political parasites, this is inevitable. Unfortunately, the ever-expanding blind profit chasing, at the exclusion of everything else, kills the chance of that happening.
What @surgical_fire is describing is the "minimum viable product" for a career. It's the thing that serves the basics on Maslow's Hierarchy.
What @hshshshshsh is describing is anything past that. We briefly exist sandwiched between two eternities -- shouldn't we care about the quality of our time during the thing that takes up the largest quantity of our time?
The problem is that, the issue that @hshshshshsh is pointing out is precisely what makes the minimum @surgical_fire is describing damn near impossible to find.
Because no one gives a shit about users, values, mission, etc, the company suffers and turns into a shit-show, incentivizing people to become more selfish so that they don't get sucked into the vortex of shit.
In order to reach the minimum of a "tolerable" job that doesn't suck up all your free time or make your time there a living hell, the company _must_ engage with at least some of what @hshshshshsh is describing.
This requires some amount of good faith from the majority involved. This is a tricky and fragile thing. It's easy to lose. And thus the cycle begins anew.
Ultimately, we need more people thinking like @hshshshshsh so that we can get what @surgical_fire is describing.
You almost need (not going to be definitive because some big companies just need to execute the same operations for hundreds of years) a Jobs or Gates or someone who doesn't believe their own bullshit and is willing to say "this sucks, we're shitcanning it."
Visionaries and solution oriented devs can’t deliver the kind of quarterly “profitability” that careerist, KPI-chasing, promotion-hungry product managers love to promise.
Jobs was no angel, but he did follow "build great things and profits will come" philosophy. Apple these days is run for profit: profits are clearly first, and good things might accidentally come as well as a side effect.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
I agree about project titan/cars. That was a behemoth of a failed experiment experiment.
As for vision pro though and I guess even to a little extent the car exploration, it's sort of "safe" and derivative conceptually.
Steve's experiments were often seemingly directly at odds with profitability. Like, one day he may have looked at the extensive lineup with the "Pro Max" etc, and made the call to cut back down to one iPhone model. Or he would, you know, do something ridiculous like make the next Imac's screen round or something.
It's decisions like that which primarily profit driven mega corporations just can't do.
They could do “tacky things” without affecting a whole product category. Arguably they are doing potentially unprofitable experiments in their main product lines, like with the iPhone mini and the upcoming iPhone Air. They just aren’t “tacky”. I think they could go a bit more outside the comfort zone without immediately jeopardizing profitability and incurring the wrath of the shareholders.
Yep, the fundamental design of the iMac hasn't changed much since the iMac G5 in 2004. Yes, it is thinner, a new material and more refined but it is still a box on a stand with a screen.
They are either turbo sensible or doing silly things like Titan/Vision.
True but I guess I don’t find those visionary at all.
Historically Apple refines something common that already exists and makes it cool. The last big thing they made cool was the smartphone, followed by the AirPod pros. I think AirPods really pushed headphones ahead. Do you remember how bad wireless headphones used to be?
So I guess I want that sort of Apple experience. If Apple turned ordinary hardware experiences into premium, that would be nice. AR googles are not ordinary experiences. Smartphones were.
You mean the old classic way of doing business where the company focuses on the product and the customer and not the shareholder? What a shocking and novel idea.
I had a 3rd party band-aid sticker on the iPhone 4 I waited in line to buy at the flagship Apple Store in San Francisco. I remember Square handing out aux-input cardreaders for free to me and other line-con attendees pre-purchase. This was jailbreakme times. Cydia pre-exists the Apple App Store on iOS, in case anyone was unaware. Cydia and the wider jb scene used to keep Apple honeset, as Cydia is the original App Store. How the mighty have fallen.
Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
he was vocal about his opposition to intrusive ads in particular. he'd say "You’re either the customer or you’re the product." he believed users paid a premium for apple products and that they should not be subjected to compromises with advertising.
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
Jobs disliked anything where Apple wasn't getting a cut. Flash games and Google ads being two of the biggest offenders in his eyes.
He also "hated" the small tablets Samsung were making, saying in a keynote that you'd have to file your finger down to use it. He said this knowing full well Apple were launching the iPad Mini in 12 months' time.
I really hope one day Jobs' marketer-speak soundbites stop being repeated like like biblical pronouncements. The App Store, Apple News, Stocks and other properties are filled with hideous Google-like ads today, and Jobs likely wouldn't bat an eye, because they brought in money.
I think Jobs recognised that ads are intrusions into people’s lives. The advertiser has a responsibility to respect the audience. They don’t have a natural right to that attention, and have to earn it.
Thats why the F1 wallet add is such a bad move. It’s disrespectful and intrusive.
iAD was supposed to be about innovative, informative, well designed high quality adverts. It never really worked out though.
Yeah, “Jobs hated ads” is a such a wild rewriting of the history of one of industry’s greatest marketers and, yes, ad men. (1984 commercial. Mac vs PC.)
I am curious what you attribute that Warren Buffett is asking Tim Cook to do? Warren is notorious for being hands-off with operations. I can't imagine him having ANY commentary on what Tim Cook should be doing with Apple other than with capital allocation.
Cook is an operations person. He makes the logistics work. He's no visionary. Jobs is a visionary, but is not a logistics person. Apple struck lightning when both existed, to provide complimentary ideas and counterbalances.
Same with Ive and Jobs. Ive was a great designer, but no usability expert. Jobs put practical limits on and as soon as Jobs was gone, Ive got total control. The result is some of the least-popular Mac laptops ever.
I remember when Jobs killed the Herald Square Apple Store even though the lease had been signed and it 'made sense' on paper. When visiting the location it's clear it's a dump and no Apple store will fix that. He put his brand before short term revenue.
I feel like there’s a taste aspect and also a focus/discipline kind of dimension to it. For the longest, they’d essentialize everything almost brutally: like that whole thing about the iPhone coming with no manual since you didn’t need it. The design only afforded you one right way to find and do things.
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
I’m actually curious how they were able to exactly filter some of their less promising impulses.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
Will they though? Where does a privacy-conscious consumer turn? The only other serious option is Android, where Google will eagerly track all the things.
Is that lack of competence, or lack of motive? Is it a problem from their point of view.
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
I loved MagSafe, but after the USB C power, I don't love it. USB C power could go on either side of the laptop, and if I stepped on the cable it still easily disconnected, but MagSafe only goes on one side, which frequently means the cord needs to wrap around the back.
I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.
Anything looks worse when you see behind the curtain. The question is in comparison - who produces technology you want without that behind the scenes behavior (or being dependent on someone else's behind the scenes behavior!)?
Those of us that have been long enough around, see this Apple like the one when Steve Jobs was busy at NeXT.
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
It has become increasingly clear that Apple needs a management housecleaning. Their purposeful antagonism of entire geopolitical blocs with anti-developer douchebaggery alone should have resulted in heads rolling.
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
The point is, when Jobs was around, there was an overarching (unstated?) policy at Apple of “nobody do anything to make us look like cheap tasteless shits”. Whereas now, Tim Cook is very happy to sell out for a quick buck. He's a logistics guy, not a product guy, and at his core is a bean counter; he neither has taste nor appreciates that it has value unto itself.
There were ~60M iPhone users when Jobs was the CEO. There are about ~1.4B right now. Both respectively accomplished very respectable things. It’s not selling for a quick buck if he was able to scale the business to such degrees. That being said, I agree that Apple makes a lot of wrongs.
One google shows that’s considered the “current active user” count, not total sales. 2.3 billion by Jan 2024 (so more now) is the estimate for total sales.
I used a llm to sum your percentages and counted only 785,644,479 people. That's just over half the 1.4B claim.
However, it also linked to articles that showed that as of 2025, there are approximately 1.38 to 1.56 billion active iPhone users worldwide. So the percentages may be misleading but the number is correct.
Part of the appeal of Apple was that not everyone and their mom just had an Apple device. They heavily played on that, similar to how fashion does. That "exclusivity" (sort of) is gone now, and it shows with Apple trying to create likable, noncontroversial designs for the larger crowd. They try to make up for it with prices, but it misses the point.
I promise you, in 2005, everyone and their mom had an iPod. If you couldn’t afford the full fat iPod, you bought any of the various cheaper stripped down models. If anything, Apple has gotten more exclusive through their pricing.
Jobs had won complete cultural dominance of desktop pcs with the iMac 27". If you saw a desktop on a tv show for the past 20 years it was an iMac 27". Tim saw they could cancel it and go against their policy of minimal cords and sell separate Mac minis and Mac Studio displays.
The entire reason Apple made devices that were a level above competitors is because the design wasn’t just the aesthetic. Ive was chief designer and so obviously had a key impact.
It might be a complete misinterpretation but it seems like Ive went completely haywire when Job's was gone with the ultra thin, portless, overheating Macs with a crappy keyboards and pointless touch bars that sort of looked cool but provided no other real value.
Neither did your second sentence, and you still wrote it. Sometimes we write things down to draw attention to the fact, not to inform a naive audience of facts that they did not know.
Is this really that different than pushing an immutable U2 album into your itunes account years ago? "liking Apple" is a weird position; they're several generations away from when you could identify the company with actual people, and anthropomorphizing the company at this point seems wild.
Ads are planed to come to every single wallet out there. Card companies, merchants, and tech companies are working on this together. Apple just thought it would be a good idea to be the first to launch it. Soon it will be a norm and everyone will forget about it or even find it useful.
I have never said and rarely thought this before, but I really hope the person who came up with / approved this idea got fired for it. It’s rare that you see something so unbelievably stupid and destructive of the shared pool of trust, which Apple spent 30 years building, only for one self-interested PM to blow a chunk of it up for no gain.
If the person who came up with this reads this site, I hope they see this comment and think about how screwed the industry would be if everyone acted the way they did.
I think the person who came up with this shouldn't be fired, the person who _approved_ it should be reprimanded.
There's some intersection point between who "owns" the wallet and who is coming up with ways to generate marketing revenue.
Whoever lives at that intersection point is the real shot caller here aren't they?
Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas, that just creates a culture of not thinking outside the box. But the person who is filtering those ideas is the critical lynch pin.
> Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas,
If an idea is that bad, at the very least they should be transfered into a role that doesn't involve coming up with good ideas, since obviously that is outside of their skill set. And what's the argument for not firing the chain of people who approved it? Their job was to stop bad ideas and they catastrophically failed.
> at the very least they should be transfered into a role that doesn't involve coming up with good ideas, since obviously that is outside of their skill set.
Proposing one bad idea is not unusual for people whose job is idea-driven. When ideas are the primary currency of your occupation, you'll necessarily generate some losers. But in a company of Apple's size, that's why you rely on colleagues and - critically - a more robust approval process to move from idea to deliverable.
I hate your idea of firing (from org. or role) the idea person based on one bad idea. I don't hate the idea of firing (from org. or role) the leaders accountable for getting this idea into the world.
> Why shouldn’t it be possible for people to lose their jobs?
This is a strawman argument that seems made in bad faith, but I'll bite anyway: I am not saying that no single bad idea or mistake should result in the loss of a job. I am saying that most of the time such a response would be an extreme reaction, especially when directed at the lower-level source of the ideas vs. the more senior accountable parties who are paid to know better.
Magnitude matters, as does accountability. Creating this world of extremes where one mistake of poor idea leads to termination is a pretty quick way to a toxic and non-productive work environment. Enact accountability where it sits, not across the entire chain.
I think you and I are saying the same thing honestly.
The parent seems to be of the mind that it's never a viable option for someone to lose their jobs for something; which I find an extreme position in itself.
I'm not sure how this context is lost, as precisely this point is what I'm getting at. I'm not jumping to extremes as some imply (including you), I'm saying it should be on the table for the most hopeless egregious offences.
You're seriously comparing a single advertisement to crimes like murder? Crimes that land you in prison are generally crimes that even children can understand are wrong. You're using "extremely poor decision" for 2 wildly different things, and if you think they're remotely equivalent, perhaps you should reflect on why you think that.
I am seriously suggesting that a single bad decision (like taking some money from the cash register) can land you in prison, why do we hold jobs to a higher standard?
Learning from our mistakes is one thing, slip ups happen after all, but I’m just drawing a comparison to “a single misjudgement”.
If you don't know societies values (stealing is wrong) or a companies values (tarnishing the brand by looking cheap and desperate) the outcome should probably be the same: expulsion or exclusion.
Also, don’t go to the most extreme negative interpretation of what someone says, it’s against guidelines.
Either you’re suggesting jail is too punitive a punishment or that being fired should never be a viable option.
I’m not saying we should jump to extremes, I’m saying that the option should be on the table if you violate the core principles of the company, especially in a way that causes loss of consumer trust.
Whats the difference between defrauding Ford out of $200M and causing $200M in damages because I decided that every new Ford will include the word “I solemnly swear I will shit on the American flag when requested”?
In essence, in either case I am putting my own needs above the needs of the company and above the needs of the consumer - in a way that undermines future sales for the company too.
There’s bad ideas like “it wasn’t possible to execute this the way we thought we could”, and bad ideas like “this goes against the core values of what this company is”.
The first is something that might have gone better in better circumstances, so it’s a learning opportunity. The second shows you either don’t understand the company and decided to carry on despite that, or you just don’t care about the company, but either way it reflects poorly enough on an individual that a firing should be on the table.
You definitely fire people for pitching ideas that are against the ethos of the company. Otherwise you have no culture. It shouldn’t come down to one approver on the wallet side to see how dumb this was
Yes, but there’s nuance. We each assume a version of events and nobody really knows. In my experience, big tech companies attract a certain type of person (among others) who will not only think of stuff like this, but actively fight for it and consequences to the long term be damned. VPs who actually approve this stuff will have limited time to think about it and a lot depends on the proposal.
This looks like a group PM level decision. Bluntly, at that level we get paid enough to exercise good judgement.
Tim Cook is in charge. This wasn't decided in a bubble. A single person can't do this. It takes a lot of people to do this. A culture that allows this. This wasn't a mistake. It wasn't malicious. It wasn't even the first time.
Tim Cook did this, and anyone that can't put the blame on him is lying to themselves.
You’d think he would have learned after that U2 album disaster 11 years ago, clearly not. He’s been doing this kind of stuff since he took over.
It seemed like Jobs used the products and was trying to make stuff that he would want to use. Cook seems like he doesn’t use any of these products, and is willing to sacrifice the user experience to try and make a few extra bucks.
It seems time for some new blood leading Apple. A product person who can get the company back to the core of trying to make insanely great products that people want to use, without compromise.
I assume that this was approved by the CMO or at very least at the VP level. Previously I was the eng TL for house ads at a big co. We would've run anytime vaguely controversial all the way up the chain.
Will there actually be any short, mediumm, or long term consequences for Apple? What real, tangible trust has Apple lost that could lead to meaningful harm to them?
The only thing I can come up with is people who hold Apple to some kind of high-minded ideal, that they constantly run foul of for other reasons already.
Apple does a lot of things that are not allowed by any of the 3p developers. Someone like EU could look at that (for instance in this case a direct to consumer marketing channel that they are using to favor their own properties) and say it violates the DMA.
Google is being forced to take Google Flights links out of Search results, for instance.
Apple’s behind of curve of its third party ecosystem. All of the apps on the App Store send spam notifications, violating Apple’s own guidelines that it has no intention of enforcing.
Threads like this one are a short-term consequence for Apple.
People here, discussing it, a) demonstrate that they find the act to represent a breach of trust, and b) spread that understanding and opinion among those who read it.
That's not, in itself, a direct consequence for Apple, but it is something they need to be, and I genuinely believe are, worried about, because losing trust in them is precisely the kind of thing that will get people to stop buying their products. This is especially true given the way they've positioned themselves as a more trustworthy actor in the privacy field.
It shows they must be REALLY worried about this movie. All the reviews I’ve read say it sucks. I’m an f1 fan and from what I’ve read it sounds all pretty dumb and fake.
I saw it last night. The cinematography of the racing sequences was interesting. The races they actually depicted were not, though. The human story line was trash, just a really hokey "old guy uses gut feeling to beat young people using science" movie plot. And Pitt did himself no favours in this movie with his acting.
Apple should be sued for this. This is their responsibility. They built it, left it unsupervised, and allowed the obvious to happen.
This is not the fault of ONE low level worker and there is no reason to punish them and then walk away like you've accomplished /anything/ meaningful in the long term.
These are precisely the types of public cases that should be brought against them. It would lend a lot of aid to the anti trust efforts against them as well. They clearly privilege themselves and see the devices and app store as their asset, not something they maintain on behalf of customers and developers.
The thing is, while we care about it here at HN, most people don't really care. Apple is a cult among consumers and they aren't going to switch even if they started putting in way more ads. They know, similar to Windows, that they have an ecosystem lock in and people aren't going to escape it.
People think they don’t care, or they tolerate it, but it still has an impact on the experience. It comes in the form of fewer glowing reviews, fewer recommendations to friends, more complaints and less forgiveness for problems. The pressure builds up over time, and then they snap.
Windows is the perfect example against the claim that Apple should be comfortable to abuse their users. Windows marketshare has been steadily dropping for the last 15 years. People are tired of the abuse, and slowly but surely leaving the platform. We now have people like PewDiePie making videos about switching to Arch Linux and self hosting, large companies offering employees a choice of Windows or Mac… things that would have sounded extremely unlikely 10+ years ago.
I’m pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, having been in it since 2003. I could transition out of it within a week if I had to. There are some things I’d miss, for sure, but I’d live.
Exactly. Just because someone says they don't care, or they don't even consciously see it, doesn't mean it's not internalized in some way. A lot of the time it simply degrades the importance of the notification, making them more likely to be passively ignored in the future, however it probably runs deeper too.
The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet. It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads, talk about privacy as fundamental human rights, and then have targeted Ads, in a place / software / services where no body expected it to appear. And not everybody has the Ad, so by HN / Reddit / Internet definition that Ad is targeted.
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
Was this a targeted ad? Apple doesn't openly attack Ads - they are actively hostile to privacy invasive technology, which I don't think this runs foul of.
The problem isn't that Apple has ads, it's that Apple pushed an ad through Wallet. And in the Settings app. And in all the other untasteful places they spam with these ads.
Some people received the ad, while others did not (I did not). I don't think we fully understand what has caused some people to receive the ad versus not; maybe its just simple probability, or maybe its something more personal like usage of the Apple TV app, active TV+ subscription, having movie theater apps installed, or search interest in F1.
The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.
From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.
(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)
There was a (brief) period when website advertisements were simple, first party hosted image files. IIRC, the first text ads on metafilter (2001 ?) were just strings in the same HTML file.
You may like or dislike these things but they were not a privacy concern.
Yeah, everybody is taking about the Wallet thing, but there is a giant ad for F1 in Apple TV right now that says it can only be watched in cinemas! WTF
> It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads
What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.
What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.
The App Store Search and iCloud Ads are relatively recent thing. The focus on tracking and invasion of privacy is also a refined version of it. Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads. ( And it was more targeting Facebook Ads without saying it. Which Apple plan to destroy ) Somewhere between 2019 - 2022 They literally have to come out and said to say they are not against ads but only against tracking because the whole Ad industry was furious so they have calm things down.
Here is another angle. If Apple could successfully destroy the In App Ads industry, which they earn nothing from, and force those value into subscription, who will benefit most? Remember Apple tried iAds and earn a percentage of it but failed.
People should at least read PG's Submarine [1] to understand how modern PR and media works. Once you have that understanding the lens of reading anything about Apple becomes a little different.
> Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads.
Could you provide specific examples? It is possible that I’m misremembering, but in that case you should be able to point me to those specific campaigns.
Everything else in your comment has nothing to do with my point, though.
It's genuinely getting depressing watching HN try to justify Tim Cook's actions ad-hoc. You can't name a single ideal Apple values more than money.
Soon (2028?) "Yes, we know Apple advertises to us and backdoors their services for the government. But *at least* my personal data isn't being sold, without Apple's privacy promise I would be helpless."
Try to understand what people are saying without injecting your own preconceived notions and maybe you won’t get as depressed. Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.
I am not attacking your character. This is specifically aimed at HN's cognitive dissonance surrounding Apple doing anything possibly bad. It is pointless to shield Tim Cook from ancillary flak, the hypocrisy here is exactly why this topic is so important to discuss. The comments here confirm that, everyone is saying this isn't what they expected. It isn't orthogonal.
> Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.
That is called astroturfing, and it is a deliberate bad-faith discussion tactic. If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it. This is exactly the subliminal shit that depresses me, this site is whipped by Apple and will do anything except admit it.
Again, you’re only seeing what you want to see. Your opinion on Apple isn’t special or rare, it’s shared by tons of people on HN.
> If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it.
So someone misunderstands or mischaracterises your point, and in your mind you should never correct and clarify the misconception, because doing so is bad faith? I mean, you do that if you want to, but that’s not what astroturfing is.
The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users. We paid for a product that tried its best to sweat the details and deliver the best experience possible. UX was king. Apple made hard choices and delivered minimal, thoughtful and delightful products. The motto was "less but better".
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
Except the way some system notifications worked on iOS was always disrespectful. The kind where you unlock your device with a clear goal in mind and a modal alert pops up telling you that your battery is low, or that something "important" happened to your Apple ID, or that a system update is available, or asks you to set up iMessage again, or some other shit that of course has no relationship to what you're trying to do this very moment. It's rudely diverting your attention, interrupting your train of thought. That isn't respectful by any stretch of imagination, and they've been doing it since at least iOS 6.
Long-time iOS users like to dunk on Android but even Android doesn't do this. All these things are notifications on Android, so you could deal with them on your own time.
This is a legacy design decision all the way back to iOS 1 before notifications existed. SMS messages used to be delivered through the same modal system. I believe the Apple ID and update messages are now banner notifications, and the battery alert gives you an easy way to turn on Low Power Mode, although I agree there should be a way to make that a banner notif as well.
Apple has reverted to being a regular company. Everything is a potential revenue stream, and decisions are made based on next-quarter ROI. They needed the movie investment to meet the targets, so they've synergized with the Wallet team.
I wish the fact that every company enshittifies in the end would wake us all up to the fact that rampant unregulated capitalism just doesn't work before it's too late to make any changes at all.
Half the news stories about Apple, Google, etc are them being fined or being forced to change their business practices due to regulations. These companies employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make sure they are following thousands and thousands of regulations.
I was snarkily echoing my parent comment’s criticism (sorry!). Of course there’s lots of regulation especially once these companies grow large. My point is it’s capitalism that grew them from $0 to $3T, and it’s capitalism that’ll take them back down to $0 and recycle those assets into newer, innovative companies.
What capitalistic mechanism allows a garage startup to compete with a company worth $3,000,000,000,000 ?
Surely you've seen this in Silicon Valley: the infamous way Google (or whoever) kills your startup by releasing your product for free, waiting for you to die, and then killing the product, just to ensure there's no competition in a field they may want to one day enter.
Or they just buy you. Great for the founder! Terrible for the consumer.
There's no need for me to prove that this can happen because, as I pointed out, it already has happened many times, from Xerox to HP to Dell to IBM. It's happening right now at Oracle. You can see the very earliest stages at Apple and Google.
Apple and Google control the internet, through controlling web search and browsing. One pays the other to ensure this monopoly. And none of the companies you mentioned were worth 3 trillion, and last I checked they all continue to exist and hold reasonable market share, and none of them taking market share from another is a case of a garage startup knocking off a monopolist.
The modern tech company is more akin to Standard Oil, but possibly even more powerful and all encompassing considering Google for example can determine what is true and false for a given population. Standard Oil was only able to be toppled by a State.
So again, what capitalist mechanism exists to allow a garage startup to knock over apple or Google? I completely agree with you that Google is enshittifying - my disagreement is that anything will happen about that unless a State intervenes.
A better system would be one where you never need to rely on one of only a handful corporations to talk to your friends. The way to achieve this is regulations that require interoperability - then companies have to compete on service rather than coasting on their locked in user base.
The minimum amount needed to ensure the basic spirit of the law actually happens.
The less regulation and tax you have, the quicker the wheel of innovation above turns.
OTOH, there are some cheap and easy regulations with a large societal return, like pollution regs. These low-hanging fruit should be picked, as long as the fruit-pickers don’t redirect the whole economy towards ever-taller fruit-picking ladders.
Apple hasn't existed in a time with "rampant unregulated capitalism", whatever that term is supposed to mean. You can argue there weren't enough regulations, but there were massive volumes of business rules regulations in 1976.
It existed today, so, yes it has. Capitalism describes the global mode of production, not just the United States economy. We haven't already forgotten the anti-suicide nets at Foxconn, have we? Without the margins that cheap foreign labor provides, the insanely high growth target required to please investors in a Capitalist economy can't be achieved.
I think we're fixating too much on purity of the word "unregulated." If you'd like to offer a different one I'm open to it - to me, the closest example of "regulated capitalism" is the PRC's State Capitalism, however it's a poor example given the atrocious working conditions there and the massive wealth inequality.
"Unregulated" to me doesn't mean "literally no regulations." To me it means, the owners of Capital have a very large amount of power, to the point that every regulation on them is an uphill, nigh-unwinnable battle. See: pushes for 30 hour work weeks in Europe. Or, see: pushes for socialized healthcare in the USA. I think we can both agree that the USA will never have socialized healthcare so long as the health insurance companies wield so much power and influence!
Because Apple under Steve Jobs worked because Steve had full control. Zero chance they become successful run by committee or group ownership or whatever. And they also needed venture capital in the beginning afaik.
I don't think Apple could have existed as it did under Jobs in any other system.
Apple's primary value driver (when it mattered) was luxury margins on mediocre tech. Without rampant demand, you don't have market stratification. If substantial regulation like the DSA existed in 2014, Apple's business model would look radically different today.
That's just a myth, they've had way too many obvious flaws with conscious self-interested barriers to users' ability to fix bad UX for this to be even remotely true
I'm sure at some marketing meeting at Google, a VP racing for pole posiiton has wanted to green-light the idea of putting advertisements in their Wallet app.
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
While Google may or may not refrain from putting ads in their wallet app due to this incident, the aggressive ways that they use to get me to use the wallet app have been off putting enough.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
Windows' sins are the utter lack of elegance and outright hostility to the generic users. And I understand those trigger visceral reactions for many.
Yet macos' polish and elegance just hide different issues, in particular the utter lack of flexibility (Apple's way or the highway) and expecting to solve most issues by throwing money at it (want 3D perfs ? just buy another computer)
I personally couldn't understand why I'd keep paying for both a macbook and an ipad just to have a "real" computer and a touch screen. Microsoft made the Surface Pro a decade ago now.
You're right, and I have seen this pattern elsewhere. Especially on Windows systems (I, personally, switched to Linux decades ago). So Google is definitely not alone here.
But, as already mentioned in the original article, the wallet is an especially sensitive area.
Google Photos, which comes installed by default on all Android phones, sends notifications asking you to print an album with your photos through a partner.
Google Photos is the gallery app that comes with Android phones. Sometimes you will get notifications asking you to buy a printed, real life photo album with the photos that you have in your phone. That album is sold through a partner, which makes this an ad. It’s not upselling you on something you already purchased. It’s telling you to buy a photo album with the photos you took using your phone.
My point is that skeuomorphically that app is my photo album. So it's not a shocking place to have an ad. Whereas getting an ad in my wallet is a whole different kettle of fish.
Yeah it was an Easter egg style thing, similar to when the change the Google logo for special occasions. Not comparable to a push add for a movie (which I also haven't seen a screenshot of yet to be fair)
It was shown full screen after completing payment, as a distraction, and increasing the time for which Google Wallet takes over your screen during payments.
I think this is a lot worse than the U2 thing. Operating systems bundle free stuff all the time. Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
This damn U2 album still appears in my smart playlists in Apple Music from time to time - it is insane that I can’t delete it completely so many years later.
It was only able to be removed after the backlash. Apple had to build a tool for it, and users had to be connected to tech media enough to know that existed. And if they didn’t do it already, it’s too late.
The U2 episode is a perfect example of something that went unnoticed by people who already used iTunes heavily, but became a major pain point for anyone who didn’t already have a large library on their phone.
If your iTunes was filled with songs, it got lost in the noise. This probably describes all of the Apple employees who thought it was a good idea.
If your iTunes was empty, U2 became that annoying song that played by default when you connected your phone to your car for any reason or other systems that played music by default. For years I can remember this happening to people in random situations and then everyone around would groan.
Completely disagree, for many people it was the only track in iTunes. And when things triggered iTunes to play it played that.
I was in an older man’s car last year. It started playing the album. He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.
A decade later that album is still annoying people. Bluetooth triggered play or something like that and the only music on the old iPhone started playing.
I’ve met so many people who only have that one album on their devices, and it plays every time they plug into their car or connect via Bluetooth. And they are all just annoyed/accepting of it. My wife was one of them. And what made it worse was you couldn’t just pause it: with her car’s particular head unit, anything you touched (like the volume control) would cause the head unit to issue another “play music” command to restart it. Eventually enough was enough and I figured out how to remove the album for good.
If I'm reading all this correctly, it sounds like Apple has a system that will automatically play unintended music at various times from the music library. The only way to prevent this is to completely wipe out the entire library.
And the chief complaint is that there is an album in the library.
> If I'm reading all this correctly, it sounds like Apple has a system that will automatically play unintended music at various times from the music library.
No, in this case the play command was coming from the attached device. Apple’s product was complying with the command in the only way it could, by playing the songs in the library.
Of course it's not the only way to comply. The more sensible default is to continue playing whatever's in your queue. So if you had nothing there, noting would play.
That’s right. Various connected devices are over-eager to assume the user wants to play media, and command the phone into do so unexpectedly. This is fine if there is no media to play, but then all of a sudden, thanks to Apple’s decision, there was unwanted media to play, and this album would be the one always playing.
So the album didn’t cause the problem but it revealed it.
Because the presence of that album is what creates this bug and the user never purchased or downloaded it themself.
I have this same problem but it plays my wedding playlist from nearly 20 years ago. Some terribly annoying song I no longer like. I assume it’s too much work to delete my library and so I just deal with the annoyance.
If it annoyed them that much they’d have rung apple support and gotten it removed. I agree it’s bad and they shouldn’t have done it, but after a decade you have to accept some personal responsibility for it, if I bought a shoe and a rock was inside from factory and my foot hurt for 10 years at some point some of your current suffering is your own fault for not removing it lol
My partners young niece dislikes U2 and apple for that move. She said a lot of her friend are the same. It was a bad move. They should have just made the album free and not pushed it to every device.
Apple did give away free videos on the old Mac OS install cds like widows did. I think to show off quick time and that your computer can play videos (back when that was newish). They didn’t install onto you hard drive..
He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.
I use Spotify in the car, and have for years. A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of saying, "Hey, Siri, play liked songs."
"OK, playing Apple Music."
Oh, well, yet another spark of genius from the tire fire that is Siri. Whatever. I switched back to Spotify manually and went on with my day.
Since then, every time I get in the car it starts playing tracks on Apple Music. No matter how many times I relaunch Spotify, even after force-closing the Apple Music app on the phone itself, Apple Music keeps coming back.
If there is a way to get it to properly resume the playback state at shutdown time, I'm not smart enough to find it. 100% pure unadulterated enshittification... courtesy of Apple, the company with "taste."
I am probably not the average computer user. I didn’t even receive this notification, but just reading about this makes me reconsider switching my devices from Apple to open source software. I have every possible ad blocked and I have been a happy user of Apple devices so far. But this behavior feels so scammy and cheap, not worthy of a premium brand.
I feel like we need a CAN SPAM act that includes Smartphone notifications. And gatekeepers like Apple should probably simply be banned from placing any advertisements in push notifications.
The updates Microsoft has been making to add stuff the Windows lockscreen and start menu also seem like they should be at the least legally questionable.
And of course Google practically invented these things.
We just need to expand it to all forms of communication. Smartphone notifications, web notifications, phone calls, carrier pigeons, town criers and messages in a bottle. Doesn't matter what the medium is. If it is unsolicited commercial communication it shouldn't be allowed.
I got this ad, and ya, I was truly bewildered to get such an ad and then shocked that it came from my Wallet. I then spent the next hour searching how to disable this new marketing stream and it looks like nothing can be done. Anyway, glad to see I’m not alone here.
They have added an option to disable marketing messages in the wallet app..... in the new iOS 26 beta. which uh, really makes it look like they were not planning on doing this just this once.
I ended up buying tickets but the Fandango checkout flow had so many pitfalls that I doubt this converted very many people .At least 10 screens including one saying “sorry you can’t use Apple Pay to redeem the coupon” (you had to go through a further checkout and then choose Apple Pay ).
They burned a lot of goodwill over a low conversion campaign. It reminds me of the U2 album that they snuck onto everyone’s phones, but even tackier .
Apple also pushed a notification through the AppleTV app. I thought I had all notifications turned off (I turn off notifications from most apps on all devices, just because you think I need to see your messages doesn't mean I think that and most apps do not need notifications). Quite irritating. That was the point where I decided I would not see F1 in theaters, and if I ever do it'll be free streaming.
As I've said for the last ten years about Apple and ads, as soon as the momentum slows down, they will put ads everywhere and sell your data next if it keeps revenue growth up.
This year for the first time I started carrying an Android along with my iPhone. I've had Apple phones exclusively since I got my first smartphone in 2012, and before now never had a wandering eye. But the moves Apple has made lately make me realize it is time to make sure I'll have a ripcord to pull if I need one.
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
The irony is Apple is spending a fortune on their Secure with Apple marketing campaign, the one that ends with the Apple logo turning into a lock that clicks shut, and they’ve undone that, plus some, with the F1 campaign. This is a blunder of epic proportions and is illustrative of a company no longer in touch with their core identity and principles.
Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising. Companies ultimately serve whoever they make their money from; and none of the other big tech players have a comprehensive business model where the end user is the customer instead of the product.
And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.
The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
> And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
I just want to highlight this because Hacker News can be incredibly dismissive about this.
Apple’s focus on privacy is a competitive advantage. Consumers value it, and Apple’s competitors have business models that undermine it.
Even if you think Tim Cook is the literal devil and Apple will do absolutely anything for a buck, Apple’s focus on privacy is still relevant.
Privacy is valuable to Apple. It’s a wedge they can use against their competitors. Google doesn’t make their fortune selling hardware, they make it selling ads. Privacy is something that gets in the way of Google’s profits.
Because Apple are in this position, it’s profitable to them to champion privacy. It’s something they can do that’s valuable to customers that their competitors are at a disadvantage with.
You don’t have to be a fan of Apple, and you don’t have to trust Apple. All you have to do is believe they want to make money. Being pro-privacy is profitable to Apple, and so they act accordingly.
I disagree with you. I think the majority of Apple's promises are purely marketing. And this is a moment where the mask has slipped. Your account does not allow for the case where Apple can successfully convince their users that they are privacy-oriented while simultaneously not being privacy oriented.
A great example of this is that they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken. An actual privacy-centric product, this would be a major problem. Consider Signal.
Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
There is no giant moat between Apple and privacy violation. They'll do it whenever they feel like it, and Apple customers are very forgiving.
> they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken.
It’s not completely broken. For average users, erring on the side of being able to restore from backup is the best choice. For people who need more security, that’s what Advanced Data Protection is for. You have the choice of which option suits you best; I think the default is appropriate for typical users.
> Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
What happened was they put a huge amount of effort into building a system that goes as far as it possibly can to implement CSAM detection that could work on E2E encrypted photo libraries while maintaining as much privacy as possible.
The design of the feature demonstrates they put a lot of effort into privacy – competitors just scan everything that’s uploaded to them, while Apple went above and beyond to do something a lot more difficult. The entire point of it was to detect without Apple having to have access to your photo library. There’s no point to design a system like that if they weren’t prioritising privacy – they could just scan on the server like everybody else if privacy isn’t a priority.
And what happened – everybody freaked out anyway, so they cancelled the feature. It’s an example that supports my point. Apple respond to incentives.
Personally, I wish they hadn’t cancelled the feature. Virtually everybody complaining about it didn’t understand how it worked and thought it worked in a completely different way.
I sense that you're arguing in good faith, but your first argument is very strange.
The purpose of end-to-end encryption is that the messages cannot be read even by Apple. This is a feature that they advertise in their webpage about iMessage security.
All I'm saying is that a bunch of people believe that iMessage supports end-to-end encryption and at the same time know that their messages are encrypted by a key that Apple holds and can decrypt them with via iCloud backup.
That's quite literally marketing a privacy-centric product and having the reality (for the vast majority of users using the defaults) be substantially different than what was promised.
To put it even more starkly, Apple advertises that they can't read your messages, and yet they can.
- iMessage supporting E2E encryption is a good thing.
- The right choice for the average user is to prefer recoverable backups.
- Recoverable backups undermine E2E encryption.
- Apple provides Advanced Data Protection which disables a bunch of things like recoverable iCloud backups in favour of more secure measures.
Apple deciding that ADP is not appropriate for the average user does not mean that “their promises are purely marketing”. They implemented it. It’s real. You can switch ADP on at any time. It’s just not the default, for good reason.
The incident we are discussing absolutely disproves this! Apple is happy to jeopardize privacy and the very idea of it, for a quick buck blasting an ad to all its users. They don't care one way or the other.
But the truth is, nobody really cares about privacy, least of all, users. Nobody ever bought an iPhone because of "privacy"; people buy iPhones because they work, and because they seem cool. Everyone's happy to hand over data to any service.
The reason why even the most die-hard Apple fans are up in arms about this is because it’s such a break from Apple’s normal standards. It’s the exception that proves the rule. This harms Apple more than it benefits them.
I agree with this point as well. I had the privilege of talking to a telemetry ingestion engineer at Apple, and I learned quite a bit about the amount of data they collect on their users. It's absolutely staggering.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what I was saying. I wasn’t arguing that Apple “really cares” about privacy; quite the opposite – I was arguing that it doesn’t matter if Apple “really cares”, what matters is that they are financially and strategically incentivised to be pro-privacy.
Linux is not Apple’s competitor. Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.
Obviously that incentive difference doesn't work. Otherwise Apple would be happy with being paid, while not making users the product. Cable TV is another example of this non-working incentive difference. It just takes longer, because the paying users need to be slowly dragged along into advertisement hell.
The fact that they make money doing something doesn't stop hungry PMs and VPs from pushing other revenue sources.
Amazon used to sell us items, now ad sales are a big part of their storefront's revenue. Cable used to not have ads.
If you aren't paying, you are the product doesn't also imply that if you paying you are definitely not the product. To the modern exec, everything and everyone is the product. I an surprised that gig economy apps aren't also selling the eyeballs of their workers, making them watch ads to work.
Apple needs to show revenue growth every single year. Their hardware and services businesses will eventually tap out, and then they'll start mining their users for data and advertising. It's a miracle they've managed to avoid it for so long, but they will eventually be forced to. It will probably coincide with Tim Cook's retirement, unfortunately.
Lack of openness means lack of privacy. If we can't install apps on the side that have proper adblock filtering, then all the promises in the world are hollow.
Lack of openness means a lack of privacy in theory, but in practice, openness often results in less privacy. The average user lacks the knowledge, time, and motivation to install and configure open systems to maximize privacy. They're likely to make mistakes that expose private data.
A closed system that prioritizes privacy will result in more users benefiting from greater privacy overall, even if it does give the platform more control than is ideal. And that's the issue with the wallet ads: Apple makes users more secure on average, but it depends on user trust, which it just betrayed.
Those who can take advantage of total control are a minority, and they are not really the people Apple cares about.
It’s not a dichotomy, but an observation about how data privacy tends to work in the real world. You can easily refute it with practical examples of how openness has actually improved privacy for the average user relative to Apple’s closed, managed privacy programs. Would an average non-technical Apple user be exposed to higher or lower security and privacy risk if they moved from Apple platforms to open platforms?
A non-open system is not verifyable and therefore not trustable. Therefore a non-open system can never deliver privacy. At best it can attempt to trick you into believing it does.
Risk isn’t an absolute. Open systems may be verifiable, but they are also more difficult to use, inconvenient, and lack the features users want. So most people won’t use them or will use them badly. Apple reduces privacy risk relative to open solutions used by non-expert users. The purist approach to privacy increases risk to ordinary users. It’s better to be pragmatic; Apple isn’t ideal, but it’s better than the realistic alternatives.
Advertising on old style TV, newspapers, billboards did not impact on privacy. Even non targeted advertising on the web can impact privacy because our browsers send requests to the ad servers and that's the beginning of fingerprinting, even with Javascript disabled.
The only way it would work on the web while fully preserving privacy would be if (1) ads were stored on the server of the website you're accessing or proxied by it, and (2) the website owner would never give the ad provider server logs. It can be done (and used to be).
When i first got into web hosting in the early noughties this is how i remember it being done. Want to advertise my game server on some site? Provide an image url and a link url. That was it.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."
So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.
Privacy. Except when you want to install software on a computer you own, then Apple has to know about it and approve of it. That's Apple.
It's wild to me they would claim privacy as some human right while making the only computer in the world you can't actually control without their involvement.
"Apple does have a traditional advertising business, and it does appear to be growing: The folks at Business Insider's sister company EMarketer think it will hit $6.3 billion this year, up from $5.4 billion last year.
And that's not nothing. For context: That's more than the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter generated in 2021, its last full year before Elon Musk bought the company; it's also more than the $4.6 billion Snap generated in 2023."
The article goes on to specify it's only 6% of Apple revenue. But 20% comes from Google and looking at how the antitrust trials are going, that source may soon dry up. The logical conclusion is Apple will aggressively move to make up for the loss by exploiting their captive audience.
> Apple will lose itself the day it chases profits with Ads
That shipped sailed many years back. Apple runs a highly successful ad network. It is just that most people are slowly starting to realize the true colors of the company.
They already make lots of money from ads on the App Store homepage and search. Small developers like me have a hard time competing when there's megacorps spending millions on App Store ads to rank higher.
"Like, what if you recently bought tickets to see another summer blockbuster movie? Using Apple Wallet? And then you got this ad? It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you."
I am not in anyway agreeing with the tracking of people's activities and purchases, but if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.
Any choice of wallet app, or ecosystem (ie iOS or Android) will not make any difference.
Did we ever find out what happened at Mozilla that allowed that trust-destroying Mr. Robot advertisement to happen? There seems to be a trend (n=2) of Marketing spending consumer trust for one-time media engagement clicks.
Not in detail afaik. The impression I got was that they somehow just didn't consider that people not looking for it would notice, and per the statement at the time (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/retrospective-looking-gl...) the review process was too focused on privacy vs the big picture.
I'm glad that people are mad about this. I got the ad, went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was. I was kind of surprised.
For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.
> Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
I was watching the Phillies game the other day, like I usually do, except it was Friday, so Apple owns the rights to the game. It's not the usual announcers, but fine, I can watch it on Apple TV+.
I remember getting a commercial for Ed Sheeran's new song for Apple's new F1 Movie which I can listen to on Apple Music and just ask Siri to play it and wanting to throw the remote at the TV. Apple just really wants to watch baseball with me. I prefer my crappy local OTT ads.
Apple seems to have lost its way. I feel the only reason they still advertise Privacy is that they're stuck with it at this point, or they'd be another Samsung or Google.
I miss the world when Apple had a point of view and vision that served to move things forward, not just stocks/revenue up.
I'm trying to remember if anyone complained like this about the Apple Card offers in Apple Wallet. For some reason advertising their credit card is completely fine, but advertising their movie is where people get out the pitchforks? Not defending either, I think both are egregious. I just think it's interesting.
> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private. I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.
Spot on. Look at it this way: would SJ have allowed this to happen? Absolutely not. And if it somehow had happened while he were still there, he would've unquestionably (and quickly) fired the responsible parties.
I thought they learn their mistakes from the time they gave a U2 album for free on iTunes (but forcing everyone on iTunes to have it). It’s the same thing here but worst with ads. Pushing their stuff in our personal apps and lives without our permission, free stuff or not. But they still made the same mistake…
It actually only sent the notification if it detected in your wallet you had enough to cover 1 x ticket from your local theatre. If you didn't, the Notes app will notify you once it is free on streaming.
Chinese phones are way more aggressive in showing ads. They have graduated to showing ads via the Live Activities feature, or push notifications with the Time Sensitive bit on to bypass Do Not Disturb.
There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s
My maps widget randomly took me to some BS Apple movie scene location with a bunch of movie branding right in the maps UI. There was nothing nearby about it. It was like two continents away from me.
> destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, to get users to believe that it’s private. That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?
Living in Asia for a while, this stuff is so mild... all these "super-apps" are always so annoying with cross-promotions that are impossible to turn off. It's true that they are usually not yet having root level access.
because it's one of the only apps i've not disabled notifications for. you could've muted already tv+ ,mail ,stocks ,news ,fitness ,whatever. but not wallet cuz you leave that on for flights ,covid passes ,payments ,and some legit actions.
I feel vindicated for when I said that the moment Apple's line stops growing, they'll resort to monetizing their users like the rest of big-tech to increase their shareholder returns, and everyone here was like "Nooo, my sweet innocent publicly traded trillion dollar corporation would never betray me like that". Give it a few more years love, now they're boiling the frog.
What do you mean start monetizing ? I get adds for their Apple Arcade trial on top of my iOS settings main screen.
I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
I don't really understand, I don't get ads on my Android phone?
And I'm not sure what you mean about ecosystems either, yes you do need a Google account to download apps from the Play store, but you also need an Apple account to use the Apple store as far as I know.
In my experience it's easier to create a second Google account than a second Apple account.
Now I'm not representative of most users, like all HN users probably. But at home, apart from my M1 Mac (running Linux because I hate macOS) my other machines are Intel n100-based. They work fine.
Android is preloaded with different flavor of crap depending on the vendor and side-loading a phone OS and dealing with everything - I just don't have the energy these days. Likewise for running Linux on top of a M series Apple device. My devices just work and they all work together - all I have to do is login to the same account. My phone shares stuff with my Mac without any setup - shared clipboard, apps, storage. Buds connect to all my devices, Mac Mini, MadBook, iPad - not just 2 BT devices at a time, and they switch seamlessly. Stuff that saves me time and just does what I want. And all of the devices are usually among the best in class individually.
Nobody outside of Apple even has that as a vision. Microsoft is so bad at building consumer products it's unbelievable. Google is struggling to build compiling phones with its own software - I doubt they can execute on other device types. Valve did a relatively small investment in this ecosystem and brought it forward light years in the gaming space.
For the desktop, I could probably just use Linux, but you're right, in terms of eco-system, where would I go?
Phones are even worse. You basically stuck on iOS and Android and I honestly see no situation where picking Android wouldn't be worse. You have a better selection of phone, and you could run /e/OS, Calyx, or something else, but that's just a hassle. I'm not a big fan of the direction iOS is developing, it tried to do way to much and the UI has become a mess.
Graphene, Calyx, /e/OS... they work and you can install apps from the Play Store, the feedback I got is just that the few apps I need that can't be replaced keeps breaking. It's just more of a hassle than I'm willing to endure. But you right, it is an option.
Isn't politics famous for moralizing inherently immoral decisions, such that people forget how to engage in constructive discourse and resign themselves to tribalism? Doesn't that process inherently degrade the quality of both politics and technology?
Maybe I'm alone, but one of the few reasons I care about technology is to not treat it like politics or fairy magic.
>It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.
I daily drove fedora last summer for a few months and it was a joke on how unstable it was. Slack would crash when screen sharing, likewise for chrome/gmeet, camera corruption bugs. Just two days ago I was teasing a coworker on a daily that we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself. Chrome would randomly stop rendering all windows when watching YouToube in a separate window. KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable but had issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland (Plasma 6 supported this). Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs and trying stuff out, breaking my audio several times in the process. My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD. And this is all on a well supported desktop machine. Laptop and power management was even worse last time I tried it. Hell I never had a PC laptop that managed sleep state reliably and didn't cook the battery in the backpack randomly.
I just don't have these kinds of issues with MacOS. The processor/laptops are just best on the market and it just works, support is amazing. It is hard to justify dealing with Linux desktop and PC hardware even at a price premium, but these days Apple devices are even price competitive compared to similar windows/linux machines.
> It is hard to justify dealing with Linux desktop and PC hardware even at a price premium
There is only one justification that I need: Apple wants me in a golden cage, and I don't want to lose my freedom at any cost. No matter how much cheaper it can get, not matter how much "better" than the competition it is, it is not worth the price. I do not exchange my freedom for convenience, status or some materialistic joy. It's as simple as that.
All your arguments against Linux are at best circumstantial and at worst bogus. Of course it is not perfect. Of course it has limitations. But it's undeniable that the gap between FOSS and Windows/Apple is getting narrower and narrower, despite the FOSS side getting a minuscule fraction of the resources available to trillion dollar corporations.
And the really fucked up part is that You are the one claiming to "hate" Apple, yet you keep buying their products and making their market dominance ever stronger.
---
Just to address your "claims":
> we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself
Never had any issues of that sort, whether I was using Google Meet, Slack, Zoom or anything else.
> KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable
I've been using XFCE since 2010 (When Ubuntu went with Unity). It is not fancy and does everything I need.
> issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland.
It has been working fine on my Desktop and my Framework laptop for some good 3 years, when I actually bothered to look. Before that, I'd just go by through customization of window zoom levels (browser) and font-size (emacs, terminal, GTK apps).
> My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD
hum, too bad? How significantly was your quality of life affected by this? Curiously, I also use an LG monitor with AMD running at 4k/60Hz, and the fact that I am "missing out" on something here does not even cross my mind.
> Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs
Did you get it working? Was the software FOSS? Can you share your findings back with the developers and help them improve their product, or are you going to keep rationalizing the abusive relationship you're in because "at least things just work, most of the time".
The biggest trick they ever pulled was changing Music.app into Apple Music, and on first app start showing you a "hey, want to try Apple Music? Tap here" fullscreen.
That single-handedly unlocked a huge cohort of boomers and other tech laypeople that had never tried Spotify or any other music streaming platform before.
It was smart and also a huge abuse of market power. Apple Music would have bombed without it. The only reason they didn't get in deep shit for it was that Apple doesn't have nearly the market capture in the EU that they have in the US, and in that time period the US didn't do antitrust against tech companies.
The worse abuse of market power there is that Apple Music doesn't have to pay the 30% to the app store for subscriptions made on the device, but but spotify etc do, so Spotify can't charge a comparable price on iOS, and also wasn't allowed to tell the user in the app that they can subscribe for $x online.
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
Ah, sweet vindication. Eventually the only company that doesn't do (all the) bad thing will start doing bad thing.
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
> but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future
No, but you should be always ready to jump the ship, always research reasonably good alternatives and never go deep in their walled garden. Ideally, you could even support the efforts to bring the freedom with your money or time, like GNU/Linux phones.
Android apps blatantly misuse notifications to push inane ads and promotions
Android provides a "notification categories" setting where user can trun some type of notifications on and other off.
Most apps I use fall into two or three buckets --
1. There is just one "default" notifications category ... so it is all or nothing.
2. There are a few categories named very vaguely with no way to actually discern what is useful and what is junk, and they also use them inconsistency.
3. There are tons and tons of notifications categories - list keeps changing frequently - so There is no way you can set and forget. So whatever you may do, ads still sneak through.
Where/how can we start pushing back on this irresponsible behaviour and shame these billion dollar brands for abusing customers and treating us like fools.
If someone has already given this form of abuse a name and a prominent online post -- maybe we could make it more popular and raise awareness.
I think Apple may be in the process of being enshittified. Stuff like this, their complete failure to do anything useful with AI, the anti-accessibility of a Liquid Glass, and the simple observation of how many things in the Apple ecosystem don’t “just work” is making me feel like giving up on it.
I spend an enormous amount of money on Apple products, and increasingly they lead to frustration and anger at the thoughtlessness and plain shittiness of them. I’m really wondering why I bother. They clearly don’t have my interests in mind.
This is why i have ALL notifications disabled, no matter the app. Companies, including apple, cannot help themselves but abuse it. Which is insane because it's a useful part of the phone functionality that I have to entirely disable because of greedy disrespectful companies. And there are no controls given to put us back in control.
Apple has lost their taste and lost their respect for users.
I use Google Wallet for some things because I am an Android user, and sometimes the most convenient way to pay for shit online is using the mobile wallet. I just happen to hate Apple more than I hate Google.
That said, both Apple and Google are shit companies that should jot be trusted with this. I with there was a third option
Also, please not FB. I have to be careful with what I wish sometimes.
Ads are annoying but I at least understand that on Apple TV you'd see ads for entertainment content. Having it show up in Wallet is a complete disconnect.
I’ve held the opinion as an Apple
Fan for the better half of the last decade that Apple is lost. When looking at their product decisions and what they’ve decided to ship, it shows.
- iPad is a confusing array of what that device is for. Is it for professional creators? Or consumers? Is it a PC? Or is it a mobile device? For the first time since its inception, it got a window manager at WWDC25. And yet, no support for any other apps outside of the App Store (EU excepted). Not a single creative professional uses it in the workplace. Not a single engineer uses it for development. And yet, a 11 iPad Pro with the trackpad+keyboard is more expensive and less capable than an M1 Macbook
- iPhone: They are absolutely scared to change anything on here because the current culture at Apple is one of "do not change what brings us the most profits". Year over year small improvements, and rising phone costs. OS 26 brought about... a confusing design change. And while some analysts are fooled into thinking that this is preparation for their VR glasses, and even if that was remotely true (it's not) the analysts forgot that half transparent displays still obscure your vision. So that's not it.
- Developer experience. There was recently a post on Hacker News about how the developer exhausted every avenue and was left with OS level behavior that only Apple could change or fix. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901619 The comments ripped Apple apart. And you know what the response was? Apple finally helped them. But look at the second blog post where the developer posted it's resolved now. Not a single detail. They signed NDAs, and the post was essentially "we can't give any details because secrecy, but Apple helped us. They're great!". I can guarantee you 100% Apple forced their hand, and in fact Phil Schiller has said publicly that they are not willing to help you if you "cry to the press".
Xcode reviews on the Mac App Store are scathing. Swift? Chris Lattner left months after Apple released Swift. And at the time it seemed like he just wanted to focus on something else. The details of why he left at the time was very hidden and hush hush. And guess what? It's come out in the Swift forums. https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr...
Horrible.
Performative nonsense. Their events are full of carefully chosen words and phrases that showcase a dead culture. One where you can't have any creativity beyond the new presenters and their fashion. Awkward corporate events that aren't fun anymore to watch as they release mundane features like "shake your mouse to make the cursor bigger!".
AI? They spent 2 years removing the "hey" from "hey Siri". Everytime you turn off Apple Intelligence, a software update will force it back on. It still can't handle simple queries. And the UX even more confusing. There's a lot to lambaste in this department, but all of it has been said already. WWDC25 didn't address any of it. The interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak was even more awkward and telling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEkK1YzqBo
I want Apple to be good. I want them to make great products again. I want them to innovate. But I guess I'm the fool for wanting a corporate entity to be good and cool.
> That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
This is pure nonsense. From someone with the experience to know better. It's amazing to me that people could say this out loud.
> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private.
The "perception of privacy" is _all you have_. You don't even have access to the technical details!
> I’m 99.9 percent certain this F1 ad was just blasted out to zillions of Wallet users indiscriminately
Stop making excuses for the trillion dollar gorilla in the room with you. You don't understand it. You've anthropomorphized it to a point of pathos. It's going to rip your arms off. It's just a matter of time.
No, people really believe their nonsense marketing. The whole “FBI vs Apple” soap opera they cooked up after the San Bernardino shooting thing convinced a lot of people.
Meanwhile Apple preserves a backdoor in the iMessage end to end encryption (in the form of non-e2ee iCloud Backups) for the FBI.
My fantasy is they create an entirely new product line called something like “Chunky” or maybe “Thiccc”. The idea is that it would have plenty of user replaceable modules. Everything would be swappable. The battery, the memory, the drives. Of course, this would still be a premium product. It would have expansion modules for things nobody has thought of yet. It’s a new market with unlimited opportunities
I think a conclusion has been leaped to that is not necessarily true.
If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.
It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.
I think the article rightly speaks of "trust-erosion" in connection with this incident because, in addition to the showing of ads being subject to the suspicion of surveillance, it raises the question how seriously we can take a wallet app that shows ads or does anything completely unrelated to its designated and propagated purpose, something that is not the reason why this app is used and in fact detracts everyone from the intended use of this app.
The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"
> If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store)
Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.
> then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?
That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.
> it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.
The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.
> But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.
Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.
Apple Wallet is in the App store, and the F1 ad debacle directly violates App Store guidelines https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/)
Interesting. I feel like this clause is violated very often by major apps:
> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.
Uber violates this. At least as of a few years ago, there was no way to get notifications about driver arrival without also getting special offer and Uber Eats spam notifications periodically. Not only was there no opt-in consent, there was no way to turn them off without disabling the status updates.
It's particularly bad when apps with legitimate time-sensitive functionality do this.
I denied the app the ability to send any notifications on principle, and now it's very annoying to have to check the app to see the driver status. It makes things worse for both me and them and I use it less as a result.
Account > Settings > Communication > Marketing Preferences. Uncheck them all. A bit hidden, but it does work.
At the point in time when I disabled notifications for the app, it did not. I tried that. Even after navigating dark patterns, digging into the menus, and turning those options off, I still received promotion notifications.
Perhaps they've fixed it since? I don't know because they've already burned my trust and they've done nothing to earn it back. Publicly acknowledging and apologizing for this would have been a way to start getting off my list of bad actors.
Even if they've made it possible to successfully turn those off deep in the menus now, whatever dreamed-up definition of "opted in" it's operating under is a tortured legalistic one that undermines the actual meaning and spirit of opting in.
I can sympathize. I don’t know about uber in particular but it gets quite tiring trying to find and follow these obscure settings.
And what’s worse is that the companies always seem to find a way to reset it to what they want quite frequently. One of their tricks is to reorganize permissions frequently so the ones that allow their spam to get through are always new.
I had to completely turn off notifications for Instagram because none of the provided settings appear to disable the almost-daily "for you" and "trending" notifications. Now I don't get notified when someone DMs me there, which has lead to me missing important messages.
Same. And I used to work there, and I raised it with them. They have all their career incentives aligned to getting people to see spammy notifications. I was powerless.
The problem with the user hostility is that, in the long term, people don't use it.
As a web dev I see so many things that are lights-on-nobody-home about Meta. The Meta app on my phone generates numerous notifications, when I get one that says a game that looks really cool is 50% off, clicking on it doesn't send me to the landing page in the their app store, it sends me to the senseless home page of the app which seems to have the message "move on folks, nothing to see here"
The Instagram web application fails to load the first time I load it on my computer and I have to always reload. On either Facebook or Instagram I am always getting harassed by OnlyFans models that want me to engage with them... on the same platform where I engage with my sister-in-law.
When they say they are "careless people" I wonder if they are not just careless about sexual harassment and genocide but careless about making money because we're in a postcapitalist hell where Zuck could care less for making money for his shareholders but rather gets a squee from sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and hires people with $100M packages not because he wants them to work with him but because he doesn't want them to work with someone else.
I went through a couple rounds of trying to raise specifically this issue with support before simply uninstalling the app out of principle. They had their chance and burned it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44421441
On Android:
1. your profile icon (bottom right) > hamburger menu (top right) > Notifications > Posts, stories, and comments > turn off ‘Posts suggested for you’ and ‘Notes’
2. on the same screen, set ‘First posts and stories’ to ‘From people I follow’
3. back out to Notifications > Live and reels > turn off ‘Recently uploaded reels’ and ‘Reels suggested for you’
This works for me, but if you’re still getting notifications you don’t want, you’ll have to figure out what category/type they fall under and turn that off.
Yes, unfortunately, they have changed their permissions structure a few times, and each time I have had to go back in and re-configure it so that the ads don't show up. It's quite annoying, they seem to be doing everything they can to follow the letter of the law while disobeying its spirit.
I can do better than that. Uninstall it.
It's a 600 MB app and you can log back in using only the iOS password manager. Reinstall it when you need to use it.
I think the 600MB part actually makes it harder to only install again when you need it.
It's interesting that 600MB can be perceived as both trivial (e.g. on a fiber connection this is a matter of seconds) and excruciating (e.g. on a rural satellite line this could be 15-20+ minutes).
I discovered this a few months ago - it's worth spending the 60 seconds to update these settings to get rid of Uber's terrible promotion notifications!
I had them all unchecked but still get the notifications in the Uber Eats app
can't find what you're talking about. Per ChatGPT, "In iOS, there is no universal path like Account > Settings > Communication > Marketing Preferences across the system. That type of menu usually appears within individual apps or websites, not in iPhone’s system-wide Settings."
So does "Too Good To Go". Missed a pickup notification because I didn't remember having angrily turned off all notifications one day, since they don't have any more fine-grained option.
I let their support know, but they don't care. I guess as long as it still brings in more additional sales than it costs in lost users, it works for them.
This is something I like better on Android: As far as I remember, separate "notification channels" are mandatory there, and deactivating a given one is possible purely from the OS notification UI, without having to dig through inconsistent and hidden in-app options.
I definitely get unmutable notifications on Android from my first-party phone manufacturer bloatware apps, which is the equivalent here. Would I like to see the new Themes in the Theme Marketplace?
Pretty sure I've had marketing notifications on third party apps I couldn't disable without losing functionality, too. Separate notification channels might be mandatory in theory, but even if so, the Play Store is worse at policing that kind of thing in practice than Apple.
Go to Settings > Apps and disable said bloatware apps.
If not visible in the list, turn on ‘Show system apps’.
It's still fundamentally down to app to properly use those multiple channels even on Android; if they want to, they can shove ads down the main channel instead.
This is one of those cases where ultimately the app stores need to have a rule about it, and actively enforce it with hefty penalties for non-compliance.
Curiously I have the opposite problem with Too Good To Go - they never give me notifications of available things I might be interested in, even though I've set that I want them.
This is on Android though, so perhaps an ecosystem difference?
DoorDash also. I tend to uninstall apps that do this if I have any alternative to them.
I uninstall even if I do not have alternatives, I install/delete Uber every time I use it. When I need a ride with them I install it, when the ride is over I tip the driver and delete the app. Every single time, no exceptions
As soon as I see one violation, I turn off the notification permission altogether. For example the Amazon shopping app can't send me notifications.
Same I think I denied the wallet app the ability to notify me after this ad. It’s so ingrained in me that I don’t think about it anymore… if I see an add in a notification I just immediately swipe, settings, turn off
I'm at the point where literally only the messages, clock, and maps apps can send me notifications.
That is an awesome idea! To send ads from messages app.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/08/18/spammy-ads-are-inva...
Why not just use the mobile website then? An app icon is itself equivalent to having a billboard on your homescreen. What is the app providing besides notifications that necessitates its use?
Mobile websites are often either non existent or work far worse than the app.
In the case of Uber, they actually have a very deeply developed webapp.
Thank you! You just saved me 700 MB of storage + whatever privacy violations the app was enabling.
I’ve said several times before that notifications should be reportable as spam directly to Google/Apple, just like email spam reporting.
Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
There should be a public API, open to any user-designated program (including self-made, without requiring any special hoops to obtain any fancy entitlements), that can act as a "firewall" for all notifications (except, possibly, for few system-critical ones), allowing it to control and modify those as it seems fit.
Applications can interact with notifications on the user's behalf via the accessibility permission - I do this with KDE Connect. I don't know what the limitations are.
On iOS?
Last time I've checked, kdeconnect-ios was unable to read any third-party notifications, not to mention doing anything to them or modifying their text or appearance in any way.
Project readme still says "Notification syncing doesn't work because iOS applications can't access notifications of other apps" (https://github.com/KDE/kdeconnect-ios?tab=readme-ov-file#kno...) so I think it's still a thing.
On Android, I forgot to mention.
Sounds great! Until your grandpa downloads a notification filter than really just forwards all his notifications to the bad guys so they can hack all his accounts
That can already happen because apps can get the permission to read your notifications.
Precisely this. There needs to be an API that all apps have to use not only for notifications but also for getting your contacts, your phone's location, etc. that is spoofable by the user. Or better yet, an AI program that runs entirely on the phone and does the spoofing automatically and entirely on behalf of the user.
Let the enshittified apps' ads interact with your AI agent and steal your fake "data" in the background without bothering the user.
Also important: It must be IMPOSSIBLE for any app to detect that its requests are being intercepted by your agent. (If they can tell, they'll refuse to work until you give them direct access.)
This is a real killer app for AI but you'll never get VC funding to build it.
On Android such a spoof app existed, it can hook into seemingly any API call and return things you control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dt50HWys1k&t=27s
But of course you need a rooted phone, and rooted phones can't run banking apps, tap-to-pay, Netflix, Pokemon Go, blah blah..
The notification "firewall" is probably not impossible to make. I use Pushbullet, it mirrors notifications to my computer (to the browser extension to be exact), and I can already dismiss notifications coming into my phone from the computer. It should be possible to make an app that intercepts all notifications, analyzes their contents and dismiss them if they're spam...
> Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
Revolut are really annoying for this. I'm sure there's a few spare days In their development cycle for someone to implement it if they wanted to, but instead they keep everything on the same channel which is 50% promo shit, because you don't want to miss that notification warning you about fraudulent activity on your card.
We also need some kind of (privacy friendly) open rate tracking and spam protection.
If many users receive a new kind of notification, using a new template, with low open rates, and uncorrelated with app activity, somebody at Apple should at least give it a 5-second glance and decide between "false positive" and "needs to be elevated"
In fact that's the main selling point for developing an iPhone app rather than a web page these days.
Tinder and delivery apps definitely don't follow these rules.
I can hardly think of an app that uses notifications and doesn't abuse it that way. I pretty much block them as standard.
The Boston parking meter app violates this FFS. Love getting Nift gift card promotions randomly from the app I'm forced to use to pay the meter /s
> Apple Wallet is in the App store, and the F1 ad debacle directly violates App Store guidelines https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/)
It would only violate App Store guidelines if Apple forces itself to agree to, and be bound by them. I think it's arguable that they probably do not, and so they didn't violate the guidelines because they're not bound by them.
Wouldn’t the guidelines apply to anyone using it who doesn’t have specific, legal, written exemptions? Not to say they don’t have it, but simply hand-waving “well they wrote it so it doesn’t have to apply to them” doesn’t seem quite as simple to me. I could be wrong!
The whole point of an agreement is that it sets out what parties will do for each other, and what happens if there is a breach.
Apple could already do things with the App Store without needing to agree to something to get Apple to let Apple do App Store things.
Apple is not going to sue themselves for being in breach.
etc.
Just because there's e.g. a license agreement doesn't mean you need to agree to something, if you are somehow otherwise authorized to do the thing. E.g. fair use, or you have a pre-existing right or ownership, or whatever.
Thanks, this is why I asked - I know law can be weird and somewhat counterintuitive, so I try not to assume much!
No. Apple does not sign up for an Apple Developer account. Contracts with oneself aren't even meaningful.
This is a common tech enthusiast fallacy: thinking that law is code. So there must be some "if app published, there must be a developer account, and if the developer account violates the rule the app must be removed". It just doesn't work that way.
Apple has contracts with third parties to allow them to distribute apps in Apple's App Store. That's it.
The law definitely is not code, but the law could require Apple to follow the same requirements they set for others. Then the government could sue Apple (or otherwise enforce this behavior.)
It's not the worst idea I've heard, tbh.
Sure, but that’s not how it works.
And it’s a pretty bad idea. It basically means that no apps that ship with an OS can be available in the store.
This is the reason why anti-trust agencies don’t like this. Apple (with its App Store) is a gatekeeper and in Europe at least it should not favor its own apps over the others(i.e maps, payments, AI integrations etc). It should play fair.
“Fair” meaning that an app that was designed from the ground up by the same people that created the device and operating system should get the same attention as a malware-ridden hack from six years ago?
What does fair even mean here? Ensuring the advantages of vertical integration can’t be enjoyed by users?
Law is absolutely fuzzy code. Lawyers are people that try to grok the legal API in as many languages as possible. Code is a great analogy.
While I am in agreement about the common tech enthusiast, or perhaps just dev, mental failings regarding law, I feel obligated to point out that App store guidelines written by the company running the app store are not law.
I think the premise is folks at Apple don’t have the occasion to be prompted to accept the terms.
Resido - the app for honeywell smart thermostats - requires notifications to be enabled to view or manage your thermostat settings or run time history. This is relatively recent because I had disabled notifications over a year ago due to it pushing ads to me.
The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.
What an awful app too. It doesn't refresh the current temperature without force-quitting and restarting. Not as bad as my water heater app though. Couldn't get it to pair after 30 mins of headbanging, finally got through to their support who told me that the app usually doesn't work and they don't know why, and that I shouldn't bother trying.
I refuse to allow any smart device in my house. Even my oven is getting out over its boots lately
Never knew this before - OfferUp is a huge violator of this where they will push notification containing only advertisements with a loud notification that is identical to those used when someone makes you an offer. There is also no way to disable those promotional notifications without disabling all notifications from the app.
A lot of companies violate that policy, and it quickly leads me to uninstall the app when they do.
I didn’t get the F1 ad though (at least not yet).
I have seen Apple abusing notifications in other areas to push their subscription services though, and it a problematic trend. It makes them look cheap and desperate.
Uber does this all the time to me. It’s so frustrating. I allow notifications from uber when I don’t from most apps because they are useful when a ride is incoming. Yet I get random spam notifications. I wish Apple would stand up for their own rules and do something about it but since they don’t even enforce this rule on themselves what hope is there
>unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI
Have we not already agreed to this in one of the million TOS prompts that Apple shows us? sad
I hope this impacts current or future lawsuits regarding anticompetitive app store practices. It's a clear example of the unfair playing field Apple runs.
Lord help us if “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” and the remedy (or the portent [0]) is throwing open the platform to everyone to advertise this way…
That element of “well it’s different when we do it” is what’s so unclassy here. And, like… so weirdly un-self-aware.
And all for a coupon for a garden-variety movie?! The movie doesn’t have anything to do with Apple, other than being made on their dime. What a strange purpose for which to piss away your perch above the fray.
At least save this intrusion for when you’re pushing a magical new self-driving Apple Car or something!
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/report-apple-is-expl...
For better or worse, Apple doesn't enforce this on third-parties either.
You cannot possibly know that. Regardless of how many instances of infractions you know of you cannot know how many instances didn't occur because of the rule and you cannot know how the known infractions were punished by Apple behind closed doors. The very existence of this rule is what makes the playing field unfair.
you probably agreed to it in the 1000+ pages of privacy policy you get at the start of setting up an iphone. And there is not one checkbox for opting out.
I've always wondered why apple feels entitled to do stuff like say "privacy is a right" while simultaneously collecting enormous amounts of data from your phone.
I think back to the dan ariely investigation into dishonestly showed that disclaimers (like license agreements/privacy statements) are pretty much the gateway to bad behavior. it's like carte blanche to do whatever they want.
Why would apple be subject to these guidelines?
Because they designed those guidelines for the best user experience.
They are for third party developers. Apple can and will do whatever they want
Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem. Everything from their ads to things like this are just in really poor taste, and aren’t something that they would have done 15 years ago because they would have thought it was beneath their brand.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste
Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card.
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) can only be seen as problematic in a world where steady-state businesses with steady profits are seen as "stagnant", and only companies that delivers (or at least promises) perpetual growth are seen as successful. Apple has been wildly successful. There has to be a world in which such a company can benefit from a demand spike without betting its entire future on that demand continuing.
> Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing)
We are in a forum were more than once I have seen people deriding mature companies as "mediocre" because of "moderate profits".
This idea that line must eternally go up and growth must be infinite is pervasive, no matter how destructive it is.
The result is this unholy abomination of a union of hustle-culture and rent-seeking.
That doesn't work when shareholders demand exponential growth year after year, with consequences, layoffs or whatever, when those numbers aren't met.
> Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting.
iPhone sales aren’t plummeting at all:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...
https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/
A graph whose data ends in 2018 isn't strong evidence for "they aren't plummeting."
That said, doing some searches for newer information (e.g., https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/) suggests that iPhone sales aren't plummeting but are instead rather stable. (Although I wonder how much of that is services attributed to iPhone as opposed to solely the sales revenue from iPhone, the source doesn't make that clear).
No services are attributed to iPhone. It’s a different category, reported separately. No conspiratorial thinking on easily-checked assertions please.
Well, since you can actually look at Apple’s quarterly report where they break down revenue from iPhones and services separately…
How does the source not make it clear? The first two bullets from your source.
“Apple generated $390.8 billion revenue in 2024, 51% came from iPhone sales
Apple Services is the second largest division, responsible for 24% of revenue in 2024”
Do either of those facts point to increases in iPhone sales?
The second source’s first paragraph says “with total sales expected to surpass previous records” for 2023, at least.
Sales are accounted for in $ terms, not units sold. It's the same thing with Hollywood. You might think movies are more popular than ever thanks to record breaking sales (pre-COVID at least). In reality, we reached peak movie, in terms of tickets sold, in 2002! [1]
Back to iPhones, this [2] page shows their stats by units sold (about half way down). iPhone is essentially treading water if those data are correct (with a peak in 2015 overcome twice since, but by ~1% each time), but I strongly suspect that that's showing units shipped and not units sold, as iPhone sales declining has been universally reported.
[1] - https://www.the-numbers.com/market/
[2] - https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/
Ask yourself the question of what it means when a company makes more dollars from a product while not increasing the number of units sold. It's completely obvious if you think about it for a moment.
While sales may not be plummeting. Hype around the market sure has. Nobody is really that excited about the next iPhone anymore.
The last time I bought the newest iPhone was iPhone 5. In the past, I’ve been getting hand me downs since most people change their phone between 12-18 months. I’m still using an iPhone X. I can’t upgrade the iOS at the moment so looking forward to getting an iPhone 13 in the next year or so.
I agree with you. Hand me downs aren’t coming as fast as they used to.
This is the first time in a long time I’m not interested in replacing my phone after a year.
That's probably pretty healthy -- phones these days should comfortably last you several years. I consider folks who buy a new phone every year these days to be engaging in pretty conspicuous consumption.
which when you look at your device, it's cost and what you use it for, should not be all that remarkable of a statement. I mean, what if you replaced "phone" with car, house or partner?
I bet id buy a new car more frequently if cars were first invented!
As it is, I bought my car new and is 20 years old in great condition. Partner … I mean, who wouldn’t want to trade in for a new model if it weren’t for the social concerns? (I kiiiid I kiiid)
If you could get the same partner with more capabilities and less wear and tear with all important information transferred into the new one every year it sounds pretty appealing.
I have bought two phones since 2010
The graph I see on that link goes only to 2018 and seems to show slight decline. What is the takeaway meant here?
Sorry, added a second source with more up to date data.
the second source shows sales have been increasing.
This threads confusing so I'll jump in!
Well, no, it shows:
2021 < 2023
2022 < 2021
2023 > 2021
2024 ??
2023 > all previous years
That's not true, though!
We can see the bar for 2021 is longer than 2023!
We can see the table value for 2021 is > 2023!
Screenshots, for sales, from 2nd link, i.e. what we are told to look to see 2021 < 2023: https://imgur.com/a/CpGWbWM
(although, my comment makes a hash of the whole thing and says 2021 is both < and > than 2023. Sigh.)
(n.b. not trying to be aggressive, or disagree, or make a statement about the overall premise that sales are declining. Just mildly amused by the confusion in the thread)
(my $0.02 would be that we're seeing the same general stasis that was presumed after the iPhone 6 release, but really, we just need more data (2021 was COVID stimmy high))
(but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018" because this is what we were shown on the Pixel team at Google, and a little birdy told me that's how Apple thinks about it)
> but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018"
Note that what was being claimed was that “Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting”. Whether iPhone sales are growing, bounced around a bit, or have plateaued is irrelevant. It’s pretty clear they are not plummeting.
Right!
Note that I'm not saying that's true! I didn't say anything about any of that! :)
This is missing the last 7 years of data…
There seems to have been a downward trend for smartphones since 2017.
Growth is either from an expanding market or an expanding market share, since it’s not an expanding market that leaves the market share.
I would image there is some substitution, with iPhones lasting longer on average it becomes more cost effective to switch to iPhones so they capture more market share. But if the general market doesn’t expand then it’s a fairly safe assumption that the new converts are going to wait before upgrading meaning that a decrease in sales is already partially baked in.
My anecdotal datapoint is 4 iPhones in 16 years which makes them rather cheap on an annual basis.
Edit: I had assumed that parent was correct, but as the peer pointed out iPhone sales have declined
Yep. And this is why “liquid glass” is the hot new thing this year. That’s basically all we have left to drive the refresh cycle that tech is addicted to.
It surprises me that this is what apple has essentially boiled down to. Yes there are people stuck in the walled garden but they were willingly stuck there tbh. They liked apple vision and felt different. But if apple is just going to lose on all fronts ("AI","vision?","This year innovation=liquid-glass") Yeah, they might not be in a good state..., Also most people I see want an iphone just rebuy old iphones and those phones themselves are still in good conditions.
Well, I’m pretty entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem because I value the iCloud integration between my devices, but all my devices are a couple years old and I tend to keep them until they are no longer supported (M1 Air, iPhone 14, iPad Air M1, etc.). In particular, I don’t drive my iPhone hard. As long as it can do phone and texting and run a browser and the Kindle app, I’m good. Needless to say, I won’t be upgrading devices for liquid glass.
Just like the new fashion season, car model year updates, and spectator sport video games roster updates. Change for the sake of driving sales. Has anyone done fashion as a service (FaaS)?
Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really.
Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space. We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over.
iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude. Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc).
One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.
Apple’s MO, at least in recent decades, is to let others blaze the trail into a new space, then do their own version that gets it right.
Smartphones were a big deal before the iPhone. People would talk about how they were addicted to checking email on their “crackberries.” But they were niche. You could see that they were going to be big, but they weren’t there yet. Then the iPhone catapulted smartphones from a popular niche to a ubiquitous product.
Before the iPhone, they did the same thing with portable music players. Afterwards, it was the same story for tables and smart watches, although not with the same degree of ubiquity. Arguably it was the same for PCs (“personal computers,” not IBM-compatible machines, of course) and GUIs, way back when.
What big upcoming thing would they do this with now? As you say, there really isn’t anything. Maybe VR/AR, but that isn’t even in the “popular niche” stage yet, the technology isn’t there yet, and it’s far from certain that it will ever be more than a tiny niche. Otherwise, what? Self-driving cars? That’s not a new market, that’s a product feature in an existing large, mature market. AI? That’s also looking like a feature rather than a new product category.
You're 100% right, Apple as a fast-follower "getting it right" tech company, and there's nothing to fast follow right now.
IoT/smarthome has been a niche/fad going nowhere since day 1.
Smart speakers are commodities.
They dabbled in an EV project, canned it.
They've dabbled in AR with the VisionPro but really it's too early, if it will ever work.
AI is software not hardware.
Apple smartphones/tablets/watches have essentially killed 10x more hardware categories than have come into existence since.
They sell a lot of headphones I guess.
The only consumer electronics I buy now outside Apple are basically higher end niche hobbyist stuff in for example music or photography. Nothing that would ever sell at the price levels ($200-1000) or volumes (billions) to move the needle for Apple.
>> They sell a lot of headphones I guess.
If you are still using bluetooth headphones as they existed 10+ years ago, and haven't tried using apple headphones with an apple computer/phone, you are missing a massive quality of life upgrade in terms of basically never having to do the pairing dance again after your initial purchase.
You don’t have to do that with non-Apple headphones either.
The bigger problem with Bluetooth headphones is that the batteries are non-replaceable, so consumers are incentivized to throw them out every few years (just like smartphones).
Some non-Apple headphones can pair to more than one device, but there's usually a hard limit, and it's fairly small. And you have to set each up separately.
Apple headphones will roam between all Apple devices that you own, and it pretty much "just works".
Of course, as soon as you step out of their ecosystem, not only you have to pair manually again, but it can only be paired to a single non-Apple device at a time.
This doesn't match my experience. Even gen 5 Bluetooth on android is still choc full of gotchas and erratic behavior.
This is something I have said for a while. A lot of the fields they are in now are largely 'solved'. Not saying there cannot be improvements but we are well into the diminishing returns phase.
There is absolutely no risk of Apple going under any time in the next few decades but the era of rapid progress is over.
Other way round with GUIs. Apple were first to mass market, and MS were far more successful.
Let's hope eink or any other type of outdoors usable display. That's a new market of hundreds of millions of devices they can sell.
I’ve dabbled in a bunch of those. Kindle. Remarkable. Daylight.
The problem is it’s always a great 3rd or 4th device. Not sure there’s a high margin high volume demand for it.
Things like Daylight could be really great if the software was more tailored to the device. And even then, you are right, I don't think it will ever be anything more than niche. It is the kind of product that if it absolutely struck a chord would be 10% of the market absolute tops.
Nothing wrong with that though. It is good to be a part of stable but solid market rather than trying to dominate it and fail.
What would be awesome is to have a double screen device. OLED on the front, eink on the back. So you could operate in simple mode if you want or use the sharp screen for photos when needed.
I believe the manufacturer Sharp is working right now on displays which will have both modes in the same screen, so no need to flip your device around.
That's like the people saying retina/HiDPI displays would only be niche, or that portable computing devices would only be niche. Good outside usable displays would revolutionize the world – especially in places that get a lot of sun. And Apple is probably the only company which would be able to capitalize on that with a "new" category of product. It's not different than people needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes...
Retina/HiDPI are almost entirely better than the alternative without them. The "almost" is just because of increased processing and power needs, which pretty quickly became insignificant. They took over because there's no real compromise. You pick the one that's better in all circumstances.
A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off. Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus. Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
> A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off.
That's not what I'm suggesting. We already have those displays. What I'm saying is that once they have the technology to make a great outdoors display without too many compromises on the other parts, then they have an entirely new category of device to replace the old, and to sell hundreds of millions of units.
> Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus.
You're arguing like you live a limited life, which I'm sure is not the case, you're just arguing in that way in the quote above. People want to be outdoors much more than just to wait for the bus. And approximately 100% of the people who work with computers would prefer to do it in a well-lit environment. Offices and living rooms are currently constructed to shield from light, to let people see their computer or TV screens better.
Not to forget the people who actually work outdoors and need to check blueprints, take orders, or whatever. Bring your laptop to the park on a sunny day and try to use it. It won't be pleasant for your eyes even in the shadow.
> see the screen a little better
It's not a little, it's a lot. Try comparing your phone screen out in the sun with a sheet of paper with something written or printed. The paper is much brighter.
> Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
They are absolutely awful, and you need to compare in real life with better screens or paper to get a feel for it.
This is why I originally wrote that Apple is the right company to bring this kind of technology to the masses. They understand that the general public will buy products that are great to use, not products which are capable of being used if the user suffers all the time.
I guess I misunderstood "needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes..." as suggesting we could have different screens for indoor and outdoor.
I often work outside in the middle latitudes when it's nice out, which usually means sunny. My laptop's display is fine in the shade. If I was desperate, I could use one of those third-party apps that enables HDR mode for all content to get it brighter than 100%, but so far I haven't needed it.
Which screens are you using outdoors? There's a pretty wide range of maximum brightness out there, so your experience will vary considerably depending on your specific hardware. A Dell Pro 16 laptop (picked arbitrarily from dell.com, I know nothing about it otherwise) display does 300 nits. My laptop does 1,000 nits, 1,600 with an HDR hack. An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
If it's sunny outdoors, I use an E-ink display. My Macbook Air does a maximum of 500 nits, but I don't think even 1600 nits is enough, which is the maximum a Macbook Pro can do with some hacking.
If you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkEa1ZttTxg
It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).
> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.
I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.
People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.
Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.
I said “good enough,” which is not quite the same as “good.” They’re usable.
Better outdoor usability is demonstrably a selling point. That’s why newer iPhones have such a high max brightness. And people will certainly like even more. But they’re not going to pay a large amount for it, or accept any loss of indoor capability. It’s not going to be a new category of device, just the same stuff except better in very bright light.
It would be a new category of device in the sense that a significant amount of current device owners will have a very good reason to upgrade and in the case of portable computers and tablets it would change completely how and where they are used. I think that's the main concern of the original question: What next great thing could Apple release to make an additional ton of money again?
I think regular LCD/OLED displays will become fully daylight capable before these specialized displays become high volume. We’re almost there today. My phone and laptop are usable outside in most conditions, but not great in direct sunlight. It’s not really the right technology for that environment, but the R&D money being poured into it is immense.
LCD/OLED displays are hardly usable outdoors or in well-lit spaces, unless you live in a very dark place geographically. They need to become at least twice as bright if not more to be pleasant to use, and by that point battery life and heat starts to become a problem.
But if they are able to make it, I'm all the happier. If Apple manages to make a fully daylight compatible device (whichever display technology), then they will have unlocked sales of hundreds of millions of devices. Because who doesn't want to get out of the cave?
Apple don't make displays. So they won't manage to make anything of the sort.
Correct. But they can instruct their suppliers to make these displays.
I would say it’s simpler than that. Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”. As others have implied, with people like Jobs and others gone, there is also no cultural resistance based on core values that created Apple to push back on shameless debasement.
It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.
> resistance to growth at all costs is futile
humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really)
the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang
we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops.
we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)
“ we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues),”
Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience.
China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products. This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?
Do you think that strategy is from their rulers? And do you think that when the rulers die, that strategy will live on?
I think it will pass like every other empire/business: ruined by future generations who did not toil for it and who will trade it for short term gain.
I don't think the obsession with the short-term is necessarily the natural state of people, especially not in leadership. There were buildings built in times past knowing full well that it would take decades and even centuries to complete.
But I think long-term thinking requires a unified people in a democracy, or a non-democratic system. Democracy in a divided society makes long-term stuff basically impossible when the next guy who comes in will just undo it to spite you. And long-term visions often come with short-term costs without anything yet to show for it, which can then be weaponized against you. Oh and the best trick of all is doing something with short term benefit and mid-term costs, and then blame the consequences of your own actions on the next guy in office. Excessive printing of money is an obvious and extremely common example of this.
> China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
I don't think this would work, they can't manipulate a sophisticated Western political system without actual sovereignty over the land. Western soft power is just that good.
If China had a playbook that could accomplish that, they would have used that instead for assimilating Hong Kong instead of what they ended up doing. They tried, but HK resisted Chinese influence HARD. So China stopped offering carrots and brought out the stick.
The west is very naive. A lot of the current state of the world is a result of western politicians believing the "end of history" theories of the 1980s - the idea that any country would naturally become a free market liberal democracy as it grew richer.
China is building soft power. We have Chinese funded teaching in British universities, lecturers moved from teaching a course because they upset Chinese students (who supported the regime), open apologists at places like Jesus College, Cambridge, agents building influence with MPs....
I agree Taiwan is unlikely to easily agree to be taken over by China, but that is because they know what living under Chinese rule will be like, not because of the soft power of the west.
The limiting factor to Chinese soft power development is its need to remain authoritarian. Folks will accept living under one if that's all they know. But if you didn't grow up with the brainwashing nobody will trust you and everything is transactional. You see Chinese attempts to exert political control over its diaspora and it never works as well as they would like.
Where the West's soft power essentially comes from in is in being the alternative to authoritarianism and it really doesn't have to be any more than that. The West will operate its own authoritarian regimes, like Puerto Rico, and Hawaii before it became a state, and the Phillipines, and these folks are perhaps the most oppressed of all. The West knows authoritarianism extremely well and is far better at the carrot / stick game of manipulating people.
When your carrots consist of patently self-serving deals to other autocrats at the expense of the public, the public eventually gets wise and puts pressure on the autocrat. The West can offer much more lucrative arrangements for all around, like that of building Taiwan's semiconductor industry. It's become a source of national pride for them and has created middle classes, a necessity for a modern political system.
I don’t know man, I would have believed this wholeheartedly ten years ago. But people are choosing true authoritarianism in droves. People just keep voting for Trump, Orban, Erdogan, and Le Pen. Trump is extremely transactional.
All of which is great news for China, and a great victory for their ‘do nothing: win’ policy.
I don't think authoritarian is the right term for critiques here. Try to define it in a way that one can't simply turn it around and apply it to people you probably don't want it to be applied to. For instance the actions taken during COVID, and against people during COVID, could easily be framed as extremely authoritarian. But then, like now, claims of authoritarianism were more of a proxy for 'I don't like the actions of this government' with authoritarianism just a framing of convenience.
In general the trends of the past were largely a product of globalism, and globalism is dying. So I expect we'll enter more into a historical zones of influence global status quo. For instance anybody who doesn't think Chinese soft power is growing exponentially should visit basically anywhere in Asia now a days. A decade ago China had relatively minimal influence, now it's everywhere driven in large part by just absolutely massive numbers of Chinese tourists as well as expats. A rapidly expanding middle class in a country of 1.4 billion has an impact that's basically impossible to overstate.
They always have. The present isn’t super special, and I think Europeans (speaking as one) realize this a bit easier, because we see populist governments rise and fall again, over and over, in different countries.
Populism is notoriously brittle, and almost every European populist party has eventually fallen once they gained actual power, because it turns out governing is complicated and can’t be done effectively while maintaining that beautiful, simple, enticing narrative that brought you into power.
But the Chinese government is not populist in the same sense, often quite the contrary. Their legitimacy seems to be derived from the fact that they have achieved real results for their population, which means they will eventually hit a different road block.
In uni, my friends used the phrase “simple solutions for complex times” as an insult for political ideas. Cutting the Gordian Knot only works well if your father spent half his life perfecting a new military doctrine for you. Still, it’s amazing how many people have “how hard can it be?” attitudes about everything but their own career/field.
Yes, it will surely all end in calamity, whether anyone here experiences it themselves or not. Humans have a major (among many) flaw, in the nasty tendency to believe they not only have a sufficient understanding of sufficient enough things, but that they also know the effects their perceived perfect choices and actions will have on such a complex system. Many religions have stories capturing this folly, the most famous possibly being the Tower of Babel, which were are furiously building in spite of what many humans call God, while others believe they have no more need for a God greater than themselves.
Orban just tried to ban the yearly Pride parade and inadvertently turned it into the largest protest against his rule ever. Trump barely took the election and may have even stolen it, if recent news is to be believed.
Electing Trump and supporting Netanyahu doesn't help much with the soft power thing.
Growth is awesome. We're incredibly fortunate to live in this high growth era!
What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term. If you make an extra buck today, at the expense of losing user loyalty, that's not what any shareholder wants.
This could be a case of short term growth being rewarded inside the company. It could also be any number of other reasons.
> What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term.
Wall St growthbros do not draw these sorts of distinctions. If the focus on short-term growth ends up tanking a company, there will simply be another company to project its growth obssession on. It could be Apple services, or Peloton bikes or Subway sandwiches, they could not care less. Those companies aren't their customers; the investment houses, short sellers, market makers and pension funds are.
That's a theoretical argument.
The empirically existing stock market does quite well long term. Apple itself is over half a century old, as are many other big companies.
Maybe. But future generations (like yours kids) will have to pay dearly for our „growth at all cost“ mentality that uses up limited resources disproportionately and unsustainably.
This stupidity isn't leading to growth though. I'm actually shorting them because their inability to produce products that actually add value to their customers lives is already manifesting in earnings/sales decay.
All you can do is be an executive, or failing that, be a shareholder
> Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”.
This right here. The perverse incentives integral to public companies are at the core of so much that is wrong with the world.
Growth is difficult when Apple is pushed out of the Chinese market because of geopolitics.
Decoupling was coined by Americans and enthusiastically embraced by the CCP.
>Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point
Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform.
Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26.
Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade.
So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base.
So they can sell to all of them.
Google tries to maintain a large user base as well.
The problem Google has is that they’re dependent on phone OEMs to release OS updates, but OEMs mostly don’t make money off software.
They ‘solved’ this by pushing a lot of security and OS features into Google Play Services, so they can update them independently of the OS. Today, you can get new apps and OS features even on older Android versions.
I still have my iPhone 12 Pro that I preordered and got in release day and it still does everything I can ask of it, though the latest Call of Duty runs a bit slow, which is making me want to upgrade. Them not releasing a smart Siri that answers to more than just basic prompts is really hurting them and I can see why investors sued them. There's no reason for me to have to use ChatGPT on an iPhone, I should be able to talk to Siri like she's an actual personal assistant and not just an easier way to check the weather and set a timer.
If they are offering value add services, I'd much rather pay for them directly than have them subsidized be ads, sort of analogous to MS Office 365 (ideally with better privacy).
Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.
Unfortunately even if you're paying for the hardware, and paying monthly for iCloud, and paying 30% of every app and in-app purchase Apple still won't give you an ad-free experience.
The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit.
Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
On top of that, Apple users tend to be in the upper half of the income distribution - like in the USA iPhones are 55-60% of the market, but that skyrockets to well over 80% in the upper income half.
There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).
There is no evidence from Apple’s breakout of iPhone revenue that sales or “plummeting”. They are stagnant.
And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining.
Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.
Apple wants to be a services company that sells smartphones.
Probably more hardware while trying to recreate the "your friends and family will leave you out" effect of iMessage.
not outside NA
Apple is an ecosystem company.
You missed an important use-case. If my phone lasts for six years and I’m extremely pleased with it, then of course I’m going to buy another one. I’m going to keep doing that indefinitely.
6 year customer cycles are not recurring revenue. they want your money monthly and annually
Nokia.
2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.
Op said "if you started with a high end card". The GTX 970 was Nvidia's mid-range at the time, and not a great one at that. A 980 Ti or Titan X can still perform reasonably well for a 10 year old card. Even with the 970, the real problem is its low VRAM (and the 3.5+0.5GB fiasco). The AMD RX 480 8G which was comparable but with much more VRAM can still run most games, even if you have to make some compromises.
You absolutely can do modern gaming on it. I literally have 2 friends in our gaming group that are still rocking 970 in their desktops.
They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away.
Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.
I used one until last year and it worked even for most new games.
And yet it can capably power many classics. Skyrim. Portal 2. Witcher 3. The same argument made above about phone hardware is largely true for gaming. The hallmark of modern gaming (and increasingly television) is sadly one of eschewing artistic creation in favor of monetizing eyeballs and the construction of social phenomena, artificial scarcity.
The comment they replied to was that a ten year old PC can do high end modern gaming. Skyrim and Portal 2 are 14 years old, and Witcher 3 is 10. I don't think a 970 could run Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
>I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for
What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
You’re an outlier. Apple has arguably the best lifecycle in the personal computing space in all of its categories.
They support most devices for 5-7 years, and have a strong incentive to do so as there is a pipeline of used devices into developing markets and their branding and segmentation means their devices have strong resale value.
With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
>They support most devices for 5-7 years
You're not responding to the case I'm specifically talking about. As new major iOS or Android releases have features I could care less about, I primarily only care about critical security releases for the OS I have. Why is it thatI have to install a new OS just to get a updated version of Safari?
Whereas I seem to be able to download usable browsers on older Android phones (with older Android versions installed) from the play store?
These phones are not my primary phones, so I'm less concerned with security and more concerned about them turning into bricks of trash sooner rather than later. A phone that can stay usuable for longer without any os updates versus one that requires os updates to stay usuable should get some points in that category. And it's been my experience that battery life of older phones are negatively affected after os updates anyway, as they are not the targete phones for new OS.
Because it doesn’t make sense with their business model.
My company had some ancient capital equipment that required windows 2000. We had a contract that supported them up until a few years ago. That contract costed a fortune, but made perfect sense for the use case. Nobody is going to pay to keep an iPhone 4 updated.
Note my comment is that you’re an outlier. That doesn’t mean that your needs are flawed, wrong or anything else. It’s just not consistent with the market’s need and represents an addressable market too small for Apple.
Sometimes companies do serve niche markets by rolling them together. Sonim, for example, made a fully waterproof Android phone that was rugged and marketed to public safety and construction customers. It also solved a problem for small customers like mine who had environments where traditional smartphones could trigger an explosion.
I don’t want a phone with design characteristics the lets it operate in a grain elevator. Likewise, I have no desire to operate a phone for many years, and the market, rightly or wrongly, agrees with me.
> They support most devices for 5-7 years
That's the bare minimum under the new EU Ecodesign Rules. Also for phones this is long, but for PCs/Notebooks this is rather short.
>With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
That completely misses the point that old Android Devices still get updated and recent Apps that work well, while Apple blocks their users from enjoying that. No more iOS Updates on Apple usually means no more App Installs/Updates after a short time
As far as I’m concerned, they don’t make smartphones anymore.
Sent from my iPhone 13 mini. It it breaks, I’ll replace it with a refurbished 13 mini or SE 3.
(My smartphone replacement budget is $1200.)
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.
Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design, and for everything else, a 6 year old iPhone can most definitely do all of that. I know, because I did all of these things on an iPhone 11 up until earlier this year, and I only replaced it because the charging port was damaged.
"I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design"
I use mine to design mines so people underground don't get killed - way more intensive than interior decorating.
Congrats man, but that's not really germane to the point, which is that a 6 year old iPhone adequately satisfies the needs of majority of the population.
An iPhone 11 does indeed do all of those things easily. The only thing it lacks is LiDAR, which I would argue very few people use intentionally and was introduced the following year anyway. Camera of course not going to be equivalent, but still takes stunning photos.
My almost 5 year old iPhone 12 does all of this. No issues, no pull towards upgrading except for USB-C.
Not sure why I'd want USB-C and then have to spend a fortune to replace all my existing charger leads with the highly unreliable USB-C ecosystem.
With USB-C you don't actually have to pay the apple tax on cords or chargers, so in no way should it "cost a fortune".
I was in my local store on Friday looking for a new torch and had a quick browse of the chargers. USB-C cables were more expensive than lightning.
That's supply and demand I suppose. As demand for lightning dwindles due to a decreasing number of people actively using devices with lightning ports, the price will tend to drop. That's not an invalid reason to prefer lightning over USB-C, but it's not sustainable. Production of lightning accessories is probably at or near 0 at this point so the oversupply will not last forever. Enjoy the deals while you can!
The cables tend to cost the same, way more than the cost of manufacture.
If you're buying them in bulk on amazon, usb-c is still more expensive than lightning, but the vast majority of people tend to buy cables when they have either lost, forgotten, or broken their existing cables. Go to a shop at an airport or train station and they'll charge you £20 for a cable, and people but them.
The "apple tax" is irrelevant to the actual amount paid.
My PS5, iPad, MacBook, Kindle all use USB-C. It sure would be nice to have just one charger.
My ipad uses ligtning, my kindle uses usb-mini, as does almost every other rechargable thing I have, from torches to portable fans.
My headphones are USB-C and by far the most unreliable. The switch uses USB-C too, but that sits in its dock.
My laptop will use USB-C, but only for some combinations of cables and chargers.
If USB-C was as reliable and dependable as USB-A I wouldn't have a problem.
Frankly, you might as well. It's an inevitability that you'll have to do that.
If you're talking about charging a phone, the usb-c ecosystem is literally never going to give you even a single instance of annoyance. If you're talking about lightning and laptop sized power delivery then, yes the cables need better labeling, but all of those cables are going to work for charging a phone.
I have several USB-C chargers and cables, some of which work to charge my headphones, some of which don't.
How they managed to convert the simplicity and reliability of 20 years of USB-A into this mess is anyones guess.
I have an iPhone 8. It does literally everything you've listed, and the battery is cheap/easy to replace. My lg v30, with a battery replacement is about the same (albiet with a custom os since androids didn't get many years of updates back then)
My 2019 iPhone 11 does all that just fine. I chose to replace the battery when it 80% of original capacity a few months ago.
I didn't think it matters if they are an average smartphone user. They are still representative of a person of smartphone users.
I'd argue the that most people with phones use them largely for social apps, messengers, and the camera. Maybe social signaling.
Thinking about my previous iphones
> Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps
No, I deleted them all - other than youtube (premium, no adverts). I used to have them 10 years ago though so a 10 year old phone would run them.
> full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know)
I have a few games to pass the time in some cases, but a touchscreen is rubbish for proper gaming. Sadly some games I had (monkey island rings a bell) seem to have been removed.
> fitness apps
Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1, so I imagine that the supercomputer in my pocket can keep track of my heart-rate with the right sensor. I am fairly sure these were all the rage when covid hit 5 years ago so it's a fair bet they'll work now.
> connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example)
Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
> works with CarPlay/Android Auto
Yes, I had carplay in my 2016 car so any iphone since then will do carplay.
> has wireless charging capability
My 4 year old iphone does that, although I rarely use it. It came out 5 years ago.
> can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design
I have to admit I have never even considered doing that
> and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay?
Yes. It's face recognition so less convenient than the older phone it replaced which was a touch sensor and also did tap-to-pay, more like "double click, stare at phone, wait, then pay". Apple Pay came out over 10 years ago.
> Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Equivalent to what? A decade ago Apple were doing big advertising spreads about how good iphones were. I assume phones released 4 years later were at least as good.
Nothing on your list is a feature a phone from about 2016 didn't have, other than magnetic charging, and the 2020 era iphone 12 had that.
You're thinking about how you use your phone, not how most people use their phone. The reason people continue to upgrade their phones isn't always mindless consumerism.
For example, when you write:
> Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
You're already showing me how you don't understand what people are buying or why they are buying it. You're referencing wired headphones as if anyone besides a tiny group of people wants wired headphones anymore. People are buying AirPods and AirPods Pro - they want them connected to their Apple Watch so they can go for a run with them, and they want new health features that continue to be released for such devices.
Reading these responses reminds me of the "inverse Reddit stock pics". If I were to take these responses seriously, and I don't because they are nonsense, Apple and others would be out of business tomorrow because any old Joe just wants to use their wired headphones and their 10 year old iPhone is JuST aS G00d. It's rubbish.
Here's a good example haha:
> Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1
Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone. Give me a break. Even so you yourself said you're not particularly fit. What makes you think you know the first thing about why people are buying new phones or new devices as it relates to fitness activities or apps?
But are any of those things a strong enough motivator to warrant the average person paying several hundred dollars more for an incrementally improved device?
You haven't really made a strong argument for why a user might upgrade specifically and immediately for those features, besides that they exist. Certainly the average person is upgrading over time as components break or fail, but why is it that you think the average person is still upgrading regularly for any of the things you listed?
Nobody I know buys a new phone until the battery dies on the old one.
Are you saying that modern airpods don't do bluetooth? And aren't supported on the iphone 11? People have used bluetooth headphones for 20 years. Why would apply regress?
> Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone.
The point is it's software, which will run just as fine on a supercomputer from 2 years ago as it will on today. What features does an iphone 15 (14? 16? whatever) have that an 11 doesn't have to allow these features?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxrv97djw9o
> The tech spec of every new handset camera is usually an improvement on the previous generation. But even this isn’t a guaranteed sales generator any more.
> “What is definitely happening is that people are holding on to their phones for longer. Back in 2013 there were 30 million phones sold annually,” adds Mr Wood. “This year it will be around 13.5 million.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/latest-smartphone-iphone-...
> Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”. Research polling 2,000 Britons revealed more than half are “bored” of trying to keep up-to-date with the latest tech. And three in four are no longer willing to pay a fortune to get it. As a result, almost a third intend to spend less on smartphones and other gadgets over the next two years.
The whole forcing a U2 album onto people’s devices thing, which happened shortly after Jobs died, was the first time I, a former Apple fan, sat up and realized “wow, these guys are really losing their taste/tact!” Weird to think that was over a decade ago!
They learned from this but still couldn’t help themselves. There’s massive full screen ads in Apple Music to “preload the F1 the movie album”. At least it’s a choice to load it or not this time, but it’s still extremely disappointing that people paying for Apple Music get shown these ads. I had recently canceled my Spotify subscription because of sponsored content in their app.
I think Jobs makes the same mistake with U2 even if he is at the helm. But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
Apple had enjoyed having world-leading crisis communications embodied within Steve and didn’t immediately know what to do when he was gone.
> I think Jobs makes the same mistake with U2 even if he is at the helm. But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
Perhaps, but there probably would have been more thought over it than just shoving it onto everybody's phone. The problem, I think, is that Apple is *mostly* run by white men over 50 - a demographic that sees U2 as the pinnacle of the rock band. They probably don't even realize that rock bands aren't "cool" anymore. I remember when Apple Music was first announced and Eddy Cue spent far too long "demonstrating" his music library and it fell flat even to the press in his age range. Usually you're best off demonstrating with "timeless" music as music tastes are so personal.
>But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
"You're holding it wrong" was about the worst case of "handling the fall out" that I can remember in computing history. Jobs was an absolute laughing stock after he said that.
Yeah, I don't think Jobs was well-equipped for the imminent era of Apple's complete dominance. You could tell he was confused by antennagate, bothered by media coverage, and wished everyone would shut up about it. He's the Underdog CEO, not Monopoly CEO.
I know that wouldn't be a popular opinion but I think you are right.
I do wonder that with Job's bowing out when he did may have been the best thing that could happen to Apples. The visionary made way for the logistic guys to let the next 20 years or so boom.
Job's departed just as most technology fields were starting to move into a more mature state, not entirely there but definitely past peak innovation. This is why I think the Apple Watch is the only thing that I think Job's would have absolutely loved out of Apple over the last decade or so. Would have thought Apple TV+ is very cool but risky, and be disappointed in the lack of progress on iPhone and might have down right hated the Apple Vision due to the hardware limits (bulk).
That album still shows up today in jarring ways in Apple Music when you use the Create Station feature because it was on everyone’s phones and their algorithm still isn’t good enough to recognize when one of these things is not like the others.
I agree that was weird - but it was never forced onto your device unless you chose to download that album (it would be like saying a particular album was "forced" onto your spotify when they are ALL available and free - this was just the first "spotify"-style album designed to be streamed not purchased).
It was forced onto your device to the extent that any other of your library songs or iTunes purchases were, whether that worked out to be streamed on demand or downloaded locally. Space was never the issue, forcing bad music in my shuffle play was.
I remember distinctly, because after trying patiently for months then years to get rid of it through official channels, I rage-quit iTunes when that whiny man’s voice started playing again the moment I connected my phone in a rental car. I still won’t touch Apple Music to this day.
For that matter, it still comes back from time to time all these years later:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/13kc29l/...
Apparently, since they have taken down their dedicated removal tool from 11 years ago [0], your remaining recourse is to contact Apple Support and persist through upsell attempts to paid support.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29208540
It was automatically added to your library, so if you shuffle your recently added or your whole library it got included.
Wow. Depending on the timing, that's a brand ending event for me. Though I am definitely not the norm.
Apple employee pre, during and post Steve. I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
> I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.
Was it common for lower-level employees to take part in C-suite meetings and arguments?
Apple was fairly flat under Steve and meetings could have a fair number of interested parties involved. I can recall numerous weekly UI meetings with several of the people listed above there. Also note that Jony, Eddy and others weren’t always high level. Steve handed out his harsh comments regardless of concern for your level. Steve was a micromanager and was involved in anything that the user came in contact with and more.
To directly address your question, the answer was yes in that if you developed a feature, a demo, or anything Steve wanted to see, you would end up in a forum with a bunch a various levels of employees.
Thinking of C suite meetings happening when Steve was around cracks me up. Steve was always on the move, making edicts, rejecting things, walking into offices, having lunch with people, etc. There was no Jira, Confluence, Agile or any of that. It was a fight to ship by an imposed date or die trying.
Sounds like he’s been around awhile, might not be as lower-level as you think.
Well, I think it would be odd for an ex-VP to be posting on HN for us plebs.
From chummy nerd fora we arise, and to chummy nerd fora we shall return…
> Phil Schiller
Rings a bell.
>Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/5/6.html by way of https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/05/23/apple-turnaround/
Yeah. One thing I learned working at a Big company is that companies are full of parasites who are there to get their promotion or salary increase and don't give a cat shit about users or mission or values. Honestly it sucked any joy out of my life but I am stuck here because of visa.
Happens at small companies too, especially those owned by private equity.
Until a company fully supports the combination of top-class engineering + top-class user experience to the exclusion and expulsion of political parasites, this is inevitable. Unfortunately, the ever-expanding blind profit chasing, at the exclusion of everything else, kills the chance of that happening.
You described any regular workplace.
You are not supposed to find joy in work. Work is something that you do so you can afford to find joy elsewhere.
You're not supposed to do anything.
Why on earth would you discourage someone from finding joy in their work? It's possible.
> Why on earth would you discourage someone from finding joy in their work?
For the same reason I discourage people believing in Santa Claus or in the Easter Bunny
Finding joy in their work is a cute idea. But it is cute and false, believing in it will lead to nothing but frustration and lower income.
I'm sure believing that helps you if that's been your own experience. But it's demonstrably possible, at least for people for are not you.
Like, are you reading "find joy" as "find a job doing what you already love"? Those are different things.
This affectation of weary cynicism is so easy and popular. I'm over it.
> Like, are you reading "find joy" as "find a job doing what you already love"?
Absolutely not.
Work with what you love, and you will never love anything again.
But isn't that a bad way to live life? Spending the best years of life working a job that you don't like so that you get weekends free?
Starving is worse.
Try to find a job that is tolerable and devote your free time to things that make you happy - family, friends, hobbies, etc
You're both not wrong.
What @surgical_fire is describing is the "minimum viable product" for a career. It's the thing that serves the basics on Maslow's Hierarchy.
What @hshshshshsh is describing is anything past that. We briefly exist sandwiched between two eternities -- shouldn't we care about the quality of our time during the thing that takes up the largest quantity of our time?
The problem is that, the issue that @hshshshshsh is pointing out is precisely what makes the minimum @surgical_fire is describing damn near impossible to find.
Because no one gives a shit about users, values, mission, etc, the company suffers and turns into a shit-show, incentivizing people to become more selfish so that they don't get sucked into the vortex of shit.
In order to reach the minimum of a "tolerable" job that doesn't suck up all your free time or make your time there a living hell, the company _must_ engage with at least some of what @hshshshshsh is describing.
This requires some amount of good faith from the majority involved. This is a tricky and fragile thing. It's easy to lose. And thus the cycle begins anew.
Ultimately, we need more people thinking like @hshshshshsh so that we can get what @surgical_fire is describing.
You should consider doing standup comedy. That made me smile.
You almost need (not going to be definitive because some big companies just need to execute the same operations for hundreds of years) a Jobs or Gates or someone who doesn't believe their own bullshit and is willing to say "this sucks, we're shitcanning it."
Otherwise you get generic slop, eventually.
Visionaries and solution oriented devs can’t deliver the kind of quarterly “profitability” that careerist, KPI-chasing, promotion-hungry product managers love to promise.
Jobs was no angel, but he did follow "build great things and profits will come" philosophy. Apple these days is run for profit: profits are clearly first, and good things might accidentally come as well as a side effect.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
They did loads of tacky things back in the day, we’ve just forgotten about them.
Modern Apple can't even do tacky things.
Tacky things under Jobs were failed experiments. Modern Apple doesn't believe in either experiments or failed experiments.
Well that’s just demonstrably false, even aside from the fact that that’s a fairly large goalpost move.
> Modern Apple doesn't believe in either experiments
Apple Vision Pro qualifies here.
One of their costliest, most visible, failed experiments ever.
Which doesn’t disqualify it from disproving the statement above it
I was agreeing!
You got me :) I completely forgot about Vision Pro
You and everyone else.
My object permanence for Apple Vision is zero. I completely forget it was ever a thing until somebody mentions it.
I think back then their stock was so bad that anything to make it go up was a good thing.
Now Apple is a multi trillion dollar company and they can’t take as much risk.
Given the Vision Pro, and the many billions spent on the now-defunct car project, I’m not so sure this is true.
I agree about project titan/cars. That was a behemoth of a failed experiment experiment.
As for vision pro though and I guess even to a little extent the car exploration, it's sort of "safe" and derivative conceptually.
Steve's experiments were often seemingly directly at odds with profitability. Like, one day he may have looked at the extensive lineup with the "Pro Max" etc, and made the call to cut back down to one iPhone model. Or he would, you know, do something ridiculous like make the next Imac's screen round or something.
It's decisions like that which primarily profit driven mega corporations just can't do.
They could do “tacky things” without affecting a whole product category. Arguably they are doing potentially unprofitable experiments in their main product lines, like with the iPhone mini and the upcoming iPhone Air. They just aren’t “tacky”. I think they could go a bit more outside the comfort zone without immediately jeopardizing profitability and incurring the wrath of the shareholders.
Yep, the fundamental design of the iMac hasn't changed much since the iMac G5 in 2004. Yes, it is thinner, a new material and more refined but it is still a box on a stand with a screen.
They are either turbo sensible or doing silly things like Titan/Vision.
> Yes, it is thinner,
And this has been the only design style they have been going for for 15 years at least: it's now thinner. There are almost no other considerations.
True but I guess I don’t find those visionary at all.
Historically Apple refines something common that already exists and makes it cool. The last big thing they made cool was the smartphone, followed by the AirPod pros. I think AirPods really pushed headphones ahead. Do you remember how bad wireless headphones used to be?
So I guess I want that sort of Apple experience. If Apple turned ordinary hardware experiences into premium, that would be nice. AR googles are not ordinary experiences. Smartphones were.
That’s just my opinion though.
You mean the old classic way of doing business where the company focuses on the product and the customer and not the shareholder? What a shocking and novel idea.
You‘re holding it wrong
I had a 3rd party band-aid sticker on the iPhone 4 I waited in line to buy at the flagship Apple Store in San Francisco. I remember Square handing out aux-input cardreaders for free to me and other line-con attendees pre-purchase. This was jailbreakme times. Cydia pre-exists the Apple App Store on iOS, in case anyone was unaware. Cydia and the wider jb scene used to keep Apple honeset, as Cydia is the original App Store. How the mighty have fallen.
Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
Jobs created iAd. He hated bad ads.
Here’s him announcing and talking about ads in WWDC: https://youtu.be/eY3BZzzLaaM?si=Dttc5eJJ1B7Zf3sB
he was vocal about his opposition to intrusive ads in particular. he'd say "You’re either the customer or you’re the product." he believed users paid a premium for apple products and that they should not be subjected to compromises with advertising.
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
Jobs disliked anything where Apple wasn't getting a cut. Flash games and Google ads being two of the biggest offenders in his eyes.
He also "hated" the small tablets Samsung were making, saying in a keynote that you'd have to file your finger down to use it. He said this knowing full well Apple were launching the iPad Mini in 12 months' time.
I really hope one day Jobs' marketer-speak soundbites stop being repeated like like biblical pronouncements. The App Store, Apple News, Stocks and other properties are filled with hideous Google-like ads today, and Jobs likely wouldn't bat an eye, because they brought in money.
I think Jobs recognised that ads are intrusions into people’s lives. The advertiser has a responsibility to respect the audience. They don’t have a natural right to that attention, and have to earn it.
Thats why the F1 wallet add is such a bad move. It’s disrespectful and intrusive.
iAD was supposed to be about innovative, informative, well designed high quality adverts. It never really worked out though.
Yeah, “Jobs hated ads” is a such a wild rewriting of the history of one of industry’s greatest marketers and, yes, ad men. (1984 commercial. Mac vs PC.)
please check my other comment. it's not a wild rewriting, just needed clarification.
I am curious what you attribute that Warren Buffett is asking Tim Cook to do? Warren is notorious for being hands-off with operations. I can't imagine him having ANY commentary on what Tim Cook should be doing with Apple other than with capital allocation.
Jobs paid for some of the most iconic ads of all time - 1984, Think Different, Rip Mix Burn, dancing iPod silhouettes, I’m a PC…
Cook is an operations person. He makes the logistics work. He's no visionary. Jobs is a visionary, but is not a logistics person. Apple struck lightning when both existed, to provide complimentary ideas and counterbalances.
Lighting doesnt strike twice imho.
Same with Ive and Jobs. Ive was a great designer, but no usability expert. Jobs put practical limits on and as soon as Jobs was gone, Ive got total control. The result is some of the least-popular Mac laptops ever.
Tell that to Van Halen!
> Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem
Sorry, having seen the sappy photo of Ive & Altman I cannot trust his taste.
https://in.mashable.com/tech/94502/sam-altman-taps-worlds-gr...
Nor should you. OP should’ve said Apple without Jobs - Ive had artistic taste, but not product or human taste.
I remember when Jobs killed the Herald Square Apple Store even though the lease had been signed and it 'made sense' on paper. When visiting the location it's clear it's a dump and no Apple store will fix that. He put his brand before short term revenue.
There was that event where everyone's iTunes suddenly had a U2 album on it. I don't really see a difference.
Truth is Apple was always like that, but Apple in particular has a lot of fans willing to play the white knight in its name.
I would consider that the beginning of the problem - and it happened shortly after Jobs died.
I feel like there’s a taste aspect and also a focus/discipline kind of dimension to it. For the longest, they’d essentialize everything almost brutally: like that whole thing about the iPhone coming with no manual since you didn’t need it. The design only afforded you one right way to find and do things.
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
I’m actually curious how they were able to exactly filter some of their less promising impulses.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
Tim Cook needs to get a grip on this. If Apple loses the privacy advocate reputation, then they will lose a lot of customers.
Will they though? Where does a privacy-conscious consumer turn? The only other serious option is Android, where Google will eagerly track all the things.
I doubt it. They might lose a few nerds but no casual consumer gives a shit.
Casual consumers get pretty annoyed by undesired ads popping up in unexpected places.
Whether they'll do anything about it is a different question.
Company takeover by bean counters and clowns. It happens with every company, sooner or later.
Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.
Until it shows up in the bottom line, they will have all the metrics and data they need to continue pushing this way.
The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.
Is that lack of competence, or lack of motive? Is it a problem from their point of view.
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
Ive wanted to get rid of all the ports on everything! Thank goodness he's gone and we now have MagSafe, HDMI, and SD card readers back on portables.
I loved MagSafe, but after the USB C power, I don't love it. USB C power could go on either side of the laptop, and if I stepped on the cable it still easily disconnected, but MagSafe only goes on one side, which frequently means the cord needs to wrap around the back.
I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.
Anything looks worse when you see behind the curtain. The question is in comparison - who produces technology you want without that behind the scenes behavior (or being dependent on someone else's behind the scenes behavior!)?
Those of us that have been long enough around, see this Apple like the one when Steve Jobs was busy at NeXT.
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
It has become increasingly clear that Apple needs a management housecleaning. Their purposeful antagonism of entire geopolitical blocs with anti-developer douchebaggery alone should have resulted in heads rolling.
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
Jobs has been gone for almost 15 years. From what I know Ive had nothing to do with anything but design aesthetic.
I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…
The point is, when Jobs was around, there was an overarching (unstated?) policy at Apple of “nobody do anything to make us look like cheap tasteless shits”. Whereas now, Tim Cook is very happy to sell out for a quick buck. He's a logistics guy, not a product guy, and at his core is a bean counter; he neither has taste nor appreciates that it has value unto itself.
There were ~60M iPhone users when Jobs was the CEO. There are about ~1.4B right now. Both respectively accomplished very respectable things. It’s not selling for a quick buck if he was able to scale the business to such degrees. That being said, I agree that Apple makes a lot of wrongs.
> There are about ~1.4B right now.
What are you basing this on, the total number of iPhones sold since 2007? If so, it doesn't account for the users that have bought multiple iPhones.
One google shows that’s considered the “current active user” count, not total sales. 2.3 billion by Jan 2024 (so more now) is the estimate for total sales.
I did quick Googling, and it sounded about right. Roughly 50% USA, 20% China, 50% Japan, 30% Europe, 3% India already is a big number.
I used a llm to sum your percentages and counted only 785,644,479 people. That's just over half the 1.4B claim. However, it also linked to articles that showed that as of 2025, there are approximately 1.38 to 1.56 billion active iPhone users worldwide. So the percentages may be misleading but the number is correct.
Part of the appeal of Apple was that not everyone and their mom just had an Apple device. They heavily played on that, similar to how fashion does. That "exclusivity" (sort of) is gone now, and it shows with Apple trying to create likable, noncontroversial designs for the larger crowd. They try to make up for it with prices, but it misses the point.
I promise you, in 2005, everyone and their mom had an iPod. If you couldn’t afford the full fat iPod, you bought any of the various cheaper stripped down models. If anything, Apple has gotten more exclusive through their pricing.
Maybe that was part of the appeal to you.
To most of us, the appeal of Apple has always been primarily that it does what it does well.
I don't think Apple themselves thinks their appeal depends on exclusivity, but rather on a premium experience.
Apple became Gucci
Jobs had won complete cultural dominance of desktop pcs with the iMac 27". If you saw a desktop on a tv show for the past 20 years it was an iMac 27". Tim saw they could cancel it and go against their policy of minimal cords and sell separate Mac minis and Mac Studio displays.
Tim saw they could cancel it and go against their policy of minimal cords and sell separate Mac minis and Mac Studio displays.
I much prefer being able to use third-party displays and not having to get rid of perfectly good screens when getting a new computer.
My current and previous machines were 27” iMacs. The first one, a first gen 5k bought in 2014, is in our kitchen and still heavily used.
I don’t know what I’ll do when I need a new personal machine.
The entire reason Apple made devices that were a level above competitors is because the design wasn’t just the aesthetic. Ive was chief designer and so obviously had a key impact.
It might be a complete misinterpretation but it seems like Ive went completely haywire when Job's was gone with the ultra thin, portless, overheating Macs with a crappy keyboards and pointless touch bars that sort of looked cool but provided no other real value.
Key impact like the shit emoji keyboard that couldn't survive a single speck of dust?
How do you know Ive had a key impact? Do you know it or read somewhere online?
“How do you know that <primary responsible person> had impact”.
Do you hear yourself?
Then all OP is saying key impact person had key impact. Doesn't add any substance to discussion.
> How do you know that? Because of the title?
Yes
3x Boosted?
Neither did your second sentence, and you still wrote it. Sometimes we write things down to draw attention to the fact, not to inform a naive audience of facts that they did not know.
> I know Ive had nothing to do with
Ok you haven’t but what about Ive?
Is this really that different than pushing an immutable U2 album into your itunes account years ago? "liking Apple" is a weird position; they're several generations away from when you could identify the company with actual people, and anthropomorphizing the company at this point seems wild.
A lot of people like Apple because it was built on Jobs’ taste and they liked Jobs’ taste.
With Jobs gone, it still has a taste but it someone else’s taste.
That said, I think some people have developed their own original taste but some people’s tastes are just an amalgamation of the people around them.
The company is donezo to be honest.
Without the huge hold of the cloud and business markets Microsoft enjoys they only have hardware.
And besides their excellent laptops you can forget of the existence of any other of their products.
They have a huge chunk of the smartwatch and tablet market.
Neither of those products is really hard to replace with competitor's products.
Apple services revenue has gone from 10 to 30 billion within the last 5 years. They are seeing extremely strong services growth.
one would've hoped w/ Angela Ahrendts Bosom St John but I guess not a cultural/operational fit.
Ads are planed to come to every single wallet out there. Card companies, merchants, and tech companies are working on this together. Apple just thought it would be a good idea to be the first to launch it. Soon it will be a norm and everyone will forget about it or even find it useful.
I have never said and rarely thought this before, but I really hope the person who came up with / approved this idea got fired for it. It’s rare that you see something so unbelievably stupid and destructive of the shared pool of trust, which Apple spent 30 years building, only for one self-interested PM to blow a chunk of it up for no gain.
If the person who came up with this reads this site, I hope they see this comment and think about how screwed the industry would be if everyone acted the way they did.
I think the person who came up with this shouldn't be fired, the person who _approved_ it should be reprimanded.
There's some intersection point between who "owns" the wallet and who is coming up with ways to generate marketing revenue.
Whoever lives at that intersection point is the real shot caller here aren't they?
Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas, that just creates a culture of not thinking outside the box. But the person who is filtering those ideas is the critical lynch pin.
Why not fire them both?
> Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas,
If an idea is that bad, at the very least they should be transfered into a role that doesn't involve coming up with good ideas, since obviously that is outside of their skill set. And what's the argument for not firing the chain of people who approved it? Their job was to stop bad ideas and they catastrophically failed.
> at the very least they should be transfered into a role that doesn't involve coming up with good ideas, since obviously that is outside of their skill set.
Proposing one bad idea is not unusual for people whose job is idea-driven. When ideas are the primary currency of your occupation, you'll necessarily generate some losers. But in a company of Apple's size, that's why you rely on colleagues and - critically - a more robust approval process to move from idea to deliverable.
I hate your idea of firing (from org. or role) the idea person based on one bad idea. I don't hate the idea of firing (from org. or role) the leaders accountable for getting this idea into the world.
Job security seems to hold higher esteem than prison.
Social norms exist outside of criminal law, and a single extremely poor decision is reason enough for people to lose their freedom.
Why shouldn’t it be possible for people to lose their jobs?
> Why shouldn’t it be possible for people to lose their jobs?
This is a strawman argument that seems made in bad faith, but I'll bite anyway: I am not saying that no single bad idea or mistake should result in the loss of a job. I am saying that most of the time such a response would be an extreme reaction, especially when directed at the lower-level source of the ideas vs. the more senior accountable parties who are paid to know better.
Magnitude matters, as does accountability. Creating this world of extremes where one mistake of poor idea leads to termination is a pretty quick way to a toxic and non-productive work environment. Enact accountability where it sits, not across the entire chain.
I think you and I are saying the same thing honestly.
The parent seems to be of the mind that it's never a viable option for someone to lose their jobs for something; which I find an extreme position in itself.
I'm not sure how this context is lost, as precisely this point is what I'm getting at. I'm not jumping to extremes as some imply (including you), I'm saying it should be on the table for the most hopeless egregious offences.
You're seriously comparing a single advertisement to crimes like murder? Crimes that land you in prison are generally crimes that even children can understand are wrong. You're using "extremely poor decision" for 2 wildly different things, and if you think they're remotely equivalent, perhaps you should reflect on why you think that.
I am seriously suggesting that a single bad decision (like taking some money from the cash register) can land you in prison, why do we hold jobs to a higher standard?
Learning from our mistakes is one thing, slip ups happen after all, but I’m just drawing a comparison to “a single misjudgement”.
If you don't know societies values (stealing is wrong) or a companies values (tarnishing the brand by looking cheap and desperate) the outcome should probably be the same: expulsion or exclusion.
Also, don’t go to the most extreme negative interpretation of what someone says, it’s against guidelines.
> the outcome should probably be the same
Why exactly besides the fact that you like extreme solutions?
Because accountability?
Either you’re suggesting jail is too punitive a punishment or that being fired should never be a viable option.
I’m not saying we should jump to extremes, I’m saying that the option should be on the table if you violate the core principles of the company, especially in a way that causes loss of consumer trust.
Whats the difference between defrauding Ford out of $200M and causing $200M in damages because I decided that every new Ford will include the word “I solemnly swear I will shit on the American flag when requested”?
In essence, in either case I am putting my own needs above the needs of the company and above the needs of the consumer - in a way that undermines future sales for the company too.
There’s bad ideas like “it wasn’t possible to execute this the way we thought we could”, and bad ideas like “this goes against the core values of what this company is”.
The first is something that might have gone better in better circumstances, so it’s a learning opportunity. The second shows you either don’t understand the company and decided to carry on despite that, or you just don’t care about the company, but either way it reflects poorly enough on an individual that a firing should be on the table.
> Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas, that just creates a culture of not thinking outside the box.
No, you fire people for generating ideas that are shady and against your own policies.
disagree. brainstorming should never be seen as a negative. trying to _promote_ and _act_ on shady ideas is the problem.
“What if we just charge a bunch of hidden recurring fees?”
Some ideas are so bad they indicate that you aren’t aligned with the goals of the company
Agreed, even when brainstorming there needs to be left and right bounds. It needs to be constructive and it needs to align to the vision.
ok, i agree that an idea that’s actively malicious toward your customer should maybe be a fireable offense. That’s extreme but we can agree. :)
You definitely fire people for pitching ideas that are against the ethos of the company. Otherwise you have no culture. It shouldn’t come down to one approver on the wallet side to see how dumb this was
Yes, but there’s nuance. We each assume a version of events and nobody really knows. In my experience, big tech companies attract a certain type of person (among others) who will not only think of stuff like this, but actively fight for it and consequences to the long term be damned. VPs who actually approve this stuff will have limited time to think about it and a lot depends on the proposal.
This looks like a group PM level decision. Bluntly, at that level we get paid enough to exercise good judgement.
Then you’re in agreement with the article:
> I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.
Tim Cook is in charge. This wasn't decided in a bubble. A single person can't do this. It takes a lot of people to do this. A culture that allows this. This wasn't a mistake. It wasn't malicious. It wasn't even the first time.
Tim Cook did this, and anyone that can't put the blame on him is lying to themselves.
You’d think he would have learned after that U2 album disaster 11 years ago, clearly not. He’s been doing this kind of stuff since he took over.
It seemed like Jobs used the products and was trying to make stuff that he would want to use. Cook seems like he doesn’t use any of these products, and is willing to sacrifice the user experience to try and make a few extra bucks.
It seems time for some new blood leading Apple. A product person who can get the company back to the core of trying to make insanely great products that people want to use, without compromise.
As the saying goes:
“Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by profit motives.”
I assume that this was approved by the CMO or at very least at the VP level. Previously I was the eng TL for house ads at a big co. We would've run anytime vaguely controversial all the way up the chain.
> destructive of the shared pool of trust
Will there actually be any short, mediumm, or long term consequences for Apple? What real, tangible trust has Apple lost that could lead to meaningful harm to them?
The only thing I can come up with is people who hold Apple to some kind of high-minded ideal, that they constantly run foul of for other reasons already.
Apple does a lot of things that are not allowed by any of the 3p developers. Someone like EU could look at that (for instance in this case a direct to consumer marketing channel that they are using to favor their own properties) and say it violates the DMA.
Google is being forced to take Google Flights links out of Search results, for instance.
Apple’s behind of curve of its third party ecosystem. All of the apps on the App Store send spam notifications, violating Apple’s own guidelines that it has no intention of enforcing.
Threads like this one are a short-term consequence for Apple.
People here, discussing it, a) demonstrate that they find the act to represent a breach of trust, and b) spread that understanding and opinion among those who read it.
That's not, in itself, a direct consequence for Apple, but it is something they need to be, and I genuinely believe are, worried about, because losing trust in them is precisely the kind of thing that will get people to stop buying their products. This is especially true given the way they've positioned themselves as a more trustworthy actor in the privacy field.
It shows they must be REALLY worried about this movie. All the reviews I’ve read say it sucks. I’m an f1 fan and from what I’ve read it sounds all pretty dumb and fake.
I saw it last night. The cinematography of the racing sequences was interesting. The races they actually depicted were not, though. The human story line was trash, just a really hokey "old guy uses gut feeling to beat young people using science" movie plot. And Pitt did himself no favours in this movie with his acting.
It was fun in IMAX. It's not cinema
Apple should be sued for this. This is their responsibility. They built it, left it unsupervised, and allowed the obvious to happen.
This is not the fault of ONE low level worker and there is no reason to punish them and then walk away like you've accomplished /anything/ meaningful in the long term.
These are precisely the types of public cases that should be brought against them. It would lend a lot of aid to the anti trust efforts against them as well. They clearly privilege themselves and see the devices and app store as their asset, not something they maintain on behalf of customers and developers.
The thing is, while we care about it here at HN, most people don't really care. Apple is a cult among consumers and they aren't going to switch even if they started putting in way more ads. They know, similar to Windows, that they have an ecosystem lock in and people aren't going to escape it.
People think they don’t care, or they tolerate it, but it still has an impact on the experience. It comes in the form of fewer glowing reviews, fewer recommendations to friends, more complaints and less forgiveness for problems. The pressure builds up over time, and then they snap.
Windows is the perfect example against the claim that Apple should be comfortable to abuse their users. Windows marketshare has been steadily dropping for the last 15 years. People are tired of the abuse, and slowly but surely leaving the platform. We now have people like PewDiePie making videos about switching to Arch Linux and self hosting, large companies offering employees a choice of Windows or Mac… things that would have sounded extremely unlikely 10+ years ago.
I’m pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, having been in it since 2003. I could transition out of it within a week if I had to. There are some things I’d miss, for sure, but I’d live.
Exactly. Just because someone says they don't care, or they don't even consciously see it, doesn't mean it's not internalized in some way. A lot of the time it simply degrades the importance of the notification, making them more likely to be passively ignored in the future, however it probably runs deeper too.
>if everyone acted the way they did.
Everyone with the power like Apple does
The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet. It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads, talk about privacy as fundamental human rights, and then have targeted Ads, in a place / software / services where no body expected it to appear. And not everybody has the Ad, so by HN / Reddit / Internet definition that Ad is targeted.
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
> Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.
Here’s a little game of insider Apple baseball:
1) why do you think the chief of design isn’t on this page? https://www.apple.com/leadership/
2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?
During Jobs era obviously design was a first order concern.
Then Cook took over but still Jonathan Ive stayed as head of design until 2019.
Ive was replaced by Evans Hankey and Alan Dye who were under Jeff Williams, the Chief Operating Officer.
Talk about a downgrade!
What is the answer to 2?
I didn’t have a proper guess for 1 but I was correct on 2. The answer to 1 is rather disappointing.
To keep the guessing game going: what percent of Apple is owned by institutional investors?
what are the answers?
No design chief since Ive left.
Top level reports to COO now.
~60% institutional ownership
> The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet.
Yes it is
I don't think you have it right here.
Was this a targeted ad? Apple doesn't openly attack Ads - they are actively hostile to privacy invasive technology, which I don't think this runs foul of.
The problem isn't that Apple has ads, it's that Apple pushed an ad through Wallet. And in the Settings app. And in all the other untasteful places they spam with these ads.
Some people received the ad, while others did not (I did not). I don't think we fully understand what has caused some people to receive the ad versus not; maybe its just simple probability, or maybe its something more personal like usage of the Apple TV app, active TV+ subscription, having movie theater apps installed, or search interest in F1.
They attack ads they are not getting paid for.
Similarly, they "solve" privacy problems by routing traffic through their services.
Ads and privacy are not fundamentally opposed.
The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.
From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.
(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)
"Ads and privacy are not fundamentally opposed"
I agree with this.
There was a (brief) period when website advertisements were simple, first party hosted image files. IIRC, the first text ads on metafilter (2001 ?) were just strings in the same HTML file.
You may like or dislike these things but they were not a privacy concern.
Yeah, everybody is taking about the Wallet thing, but there is a giant ad for F1 in Apple TV right now that says it can only be watched in cinemas! WTF
> It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads
What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.
What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.
The App Store Search and iCloud Ads are relatively recent thing. The focus on tracking and invasion of privacy is also a refined version of it. Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads. ( And it was more targeting Facebook Ads without saying it. Which Apple plan to destroy ) Somewhere between 2019 - 2022 They literally have to come out and said to say they are not against ads but only against tracking because the whole Ad industry was furious so they have calm things down.
Here is another angle. If Apple could successfully destroy the In App Ads industry, which they earn nothing from, and force those value into subscription, who will benefit most? Remember Apple tried iAds and earn a percentage of it but failed.
People should at least read PG's Submarine [1] to understand how modern PR and media works. Once you have that understanding the lens of reading anything about Apple becomes a little different.
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I think you've got your timeline mixed up. App Store search ads debuted in 2016, prior to your entire narrative.
> Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads.
Could you provide specific examples? It is possible that I’m misremembering, but in that case you should be able to point me to those specific campaigns.
Everything else in your comment has nothing to do with my point, though.
Apple is absolutely fine with tracking and privacy invasion, as long as they're the ones doing it.
Which has nothing to do with the point, which is that that’s what they rail against, not ads. If they are hypocrites about it is an orthogonal matter.
It's genuinely getting depressing watching HN try to justify Tim Cook's actions ad-hoc. You can't name a single ideal Apple values more than money.
> It's genuinely getting depressing watching HN try to justify Tim Cook's actions ad-hoc.
Your comment is absurd. I criticise Tim Cook all the time.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Try to understand what people are saying without injecting your own preconceived notions and maybe you won’t get as depressed. Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.
I am not attacking your character. This is specifically aimed at HN's cognitive dissonance surrounding Apple doing anything possibly bad. It is pointless to shield Tim Cook from ancillary flak, the hypocrisy here is exactly why this topic is so important to discuss. The comments here confirm that, everyone is saying this isn't what they expected. It isn't orthogonal.
> Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.
That is called astroturfing, and it is a deliberate bad-faith discussion tactic. If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it. This is exactly the subliminal shit that depresses me, this site is whipped by Apple and will do anything except admit it.
> The comments here confirm that, everyone is saying this isn't what they expected.
No, no they are not. That is so simple to disprove.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44414508
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44411237
Again, you’re only seeing what you want to see. Your opinion on Apple isn’t special or rare, it’s shared by tons of people on HN.
> If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it.
So someone misunderstands or mischaracterises your point, and in your mind you should never correct and clarify the misconception, because doing so is bad faith? I mean, you do that if you want to, but that’s not what astroturfing is.
The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users. We paid for a product that tried its best to sweat the details and deliver the best experience possible. UX was king. Apple made hard choices and delivered minimal, thoughtful and delightful products. The motto was "less but better".
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
Except the way some system notifications worked on iOS was always disrespectful. The kind where you unlock your device with a clear goal in mind and a modal alert pops up telling you that your battery is low, or that something "important" happened to your Apple ID, or that a system update is available, or asks you to set up iMessage again, or some other shit that of course has no relationship to what you're trying to do this very moment. It's rudely diverting your attention, interrupting your train of thought. That isn't respectful by any stretch of imagination, and they've been doing it since at least iOS 6.
Long-time iOS users like to dunk on Android but even Android doesn't do this. All these things are notifications on Android, so you could deal with them on your own time.
This is a legacy design decision all the way back to iOS 1 before notifications existed. SMS messages used to be delivered through the same modal system. I believe the Apple ID and update messages are now banner notifications, and the battery alert gives you an easy way to turn on Low Power Mode, although I agree there should be a way to make that a banner notif as well.
Apple has reverted to being a regular company. Everything is a potential revenue stream, and decisions are made based on next-quarter ROI. They needed the movie investment to meet the targets, so they've synergized with the Wallet team.
Google too.
I wish the fact that every company enshittifies in the end would wake us all up to the fact that rampant unregulated capitalism just doesn't work before it's too late to make any changes at all.
It's rampant unregulated capitalism that feeds the whole lifecycle:
- company started in garage
- makes first sales
- gets popular
- gets investors
- becomes huge, changing the world of computing
- enshittifies
- gets replaced by the next company that was started in a garage somewhere
A good system is not one that preserves Apple or IBM or Xerox.
A good system is one that allows these companies to come and go, because in the end we want the consumer to keep winning.
Apple enshittifying is bad for everyone in the short term, but it opens the door for whatever comes next.
> "unregulated captialism"
Half the news stories about Apple, Google, etc are them being fined or being forced to change their business practices due to regulations. These companies employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make sure they are following thousands and thousands of regulations.
I was snarkily echoing my parent comment’s criticism (sorry!). Of course there’s lots of regulation especially once these companies grow large. My point is it’s capitalism that grew them from $0 to $3T, and it’s capitalism that’ll take them back down to $0 and recycle those assets into newer, innovative companies.
For that to happen requires competition.
What makes you think these companies can be toppled, considering they practically write our legislation? https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/apple-inc/summary?id=D00002...
What capitalistic mechanism allows a garage startup to compete with a company worth $3,000,000,000,000 ?
Surely you've seen this in Silicon Valley: the infamous way Google (or whoever) kills your startup by releasing your product for free, waiting for you to die, and then killing the product, just to ensure there's no competition in a field they may want to one day enter.
Or they just buy you. Great for the founder! Terrible for the consumer.
There's no need for me to prove that this can happen because, as I pointed out, it already has happened many times, from Xerox to HP to Dell to IBM. It's happening right now at Oracle. You can see the very earliest stages at Apple and Google.
Apple and Google control the internet, through controlling web search and browsing. One pays the other to ensure this monopoly. And none of the companies you mentioned were worth 3 trillion, and last I checked they all continue to exist and hold reasonable market share, and none of them taking market share from another is a case of a garage startup knocking off a monopolist.
The modern tech company is more akin to Standard Oil, but possibly even more powerful and all encompassing considering Google for example can determine what is true and false for a given population. Standard Oil was only able to be toppled by a State.
So again, what capitalist mechanism exists to allow a garage startup to knock over apple or Google? I completely agree with you that Google is enshittifying - my disagreement is that anything will happen about that unless a State intervenes.
A better system would be one where you never need to rely on one of only a handful corporations to talk to your friends. The way to achieve this is regulations that require interoperability - then companies have to compete on service rather than coasting on their locked in user base.
what regulation exactly would you prefer?
The minimum amount needed to ensure the basic spirit of the law actually happens.
The less regulation and tax you have, the quicker the wheel of innovation above turns.
OTOH, there are some cheap and easy regulations with a large societal return, like pollution regs. These low-hanging fruit should be picked, as long as the fruit-pickers don’t redirect the whole economy towards ever-taller fruit-picking ladders.
Apple wouldn't exist without "rampant unregulated capitalism".
Sure they would, they just wouldn't be as profitable.
Apple hasn't existed in a time with "rampant unregulated capitalism", whatever that term is supposed to mean. You can argue there weren't enough regulations, but there were massive volumes of business rules regulations in 1976.
That's why I put it in quotation marks. Capitalism is heavily regulated in every western nation, perhaps every nation.
It existed today, so, yes it has. Capitalism describes the global mode of production, not just the United States economy. We haven't already forgotten the anti-suicide nets at Foxconn, have we? Without the margins that cheap foreign labor provides, the insanely high growth target required to please investors in a Capitalist economy can't be achieved.
I think we're fixating too much on purity of the word "unregulated." If you'd like to offer a different one I'm open to it - to me, the closest example of "regulated capitalism" is the PRC's State Capitalism, however it's a poor example given the atrocious working conditions there and the massive wealth inequality.
"Unregulated" to me doesn't mean "literally no regulations." To me it means, the owners of Capital have a very large amount of power, to the point that every regulation on them is an uphill, nigh-unwinnable battle. See: pushes for 30 hour work weeks in Europe. Or, see: pushes for socialized healthcare in the USA. I think we can both agree that the USA will never have socialized healthcare so long as the health insurance companies wield so much power and influence!
Why not?
I think Apple wouldn‘t exist without cheap labor in authoritarian countries but that‘s a prerequisite for capitalism
Because Apple under Steve Jobs worked because Steve had full control. Zero chance they become successful run by committee or group ownership or whatever. And they also needed venture capital in the beginning afaik.
I don't think Apple could have existed as it did under Jobs in any other system.
Apple's primary value driver (when it mattered) was luxury margins on mediocre tech. Without rampant demand, you don't have market stratification. If substantial regulation like the DSA existed in 2014, Apple's business model would look radically different today.
> The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users
The same Apple that tried to convince everyone they were holding their phones incorrectly resulting in Antennagate?
They put U2 album to all iPhone users
This is worse. The U2 thing was a "gift", albeit an unsolicited one that many people didn't want and were annoyed by. This is just a crappy ad.
That's just a myth, they've had way too many obvious flaws with conscious self-interested barriers to users' ability to fix bad UX for this to be even remotely true
I'm sure at some marketing meeting at Google, a VP racing for pole posiiton has wanted to green-light the idea of putting advertisements in their Wallet app.
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
While Google may or may not refrain from putting ads in their wallet app due to this incident, the aggressive ways that they use to get me to use the wallet app have been off putting enough.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
I love these choices, yes or yes later.
They do the same on my windows computer, ever time I open edge and every time I open a new tab !
This is the kind of behavior I wouldn’t even tolerate in real life, they are really taking us for sheeps.
Using windows and tolerating it’s crap is a choice, my dude. Linux and MacOS are right there.
Windows' sins are the utter lack of elegance and outright hostility to the generic users. And I understand those trigger visceral reactions for many.
Yet macos' polish and elegance just hide different issues, in particular the utter lack of flexibility (Apple's way or the highway) and expecting to solve most issues by throwing money at it (want 3D perfs ? just buy another computer)
I personally couldn't understand why I'd keep paying for both a macbook and an ipad just to have a "real" computer and a touch screen. Microsoft made the Surface Pro a decade ago now.
You can have a non-Mac computer with a non-Microsoft OS. Like I said - choices, choices. All choices have downsides for sure.
Have you tried going to "App Info" and "Disable" for Wallet?
To be fair, the “Yes, Maybe Later” pattern can be seen throughout Silicon Valley. Tech companies, by and large, cannot accept “No” from users.
You're right, and I have seen this pattern elsewhere. Especially on Windows systems (I, personally, switched to Linux decades ago). So Google is definitely not alone here.
But, as already mentioned in the original article, the wallet is an especially sensitive area.
What I learned about consent I learned from megacorps...
Google already has ads in their Wallet. https://madeby.tfl.gov.uk/2025/03/31/google-pay-tube-challen...
Google Photos, which comes installed by default on all Android phones, sends notifications asking you to print an album with your photos through a partner.
That doesn't feel like a comparable violation. I've bought more than one (physical) photo album that came with a flyer in for ordering more copies.
Google Photos is the gallery app that comes with Android phones. Sometimes you will get notifications asking you to buy a printed, real life photo album with the photos that you have in your phone. That album is sold through a partner, which makes this an ad. It’s not upselling you on something you already purchased. It’s telling you to buy a photo album with the photos you took using your phone.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/162190/how-to-turn-...
My point is that skeuomorphically that app is my photo album. So it's not a shocking place to have an ad. Whereas getting an ad in my wallet is a whole different kettle of fish.
Google was there first. During Euro 2024, the "transaction successful" screen displayed some football-related animation.
Was it an ad or an easter egg, like the "google.com" logo animations you get on new years and other holidays?
Did it send a push notification or bother the user? Got a screenshot or reference, since a quick google doesn't uncover it?
Yeah it was an Easter egg style thing, similar to when the change the Google logo for special occasions. Not comparable to a push add for a movie (which I also haven't seen a screenshot of yet to be fair)
> which I also haven't seen a screenshot of yet to be fair
The article links to https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/26/apple-wallet-se...
Which links to these examples:
https://x.com/ParkerOrtolani/status/1937551035825807545
https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWallet/comments/1ljbjrs/how_do...
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/24/apple-wallet-notificati...
(and actually a few more too)
ewww how cheesy is that.
It was shown full screen after completing payment, as a distraction, and increasing the time for which Google Wallet takes over your screen during payments.
They have been doing that for years for all sorts of things usually seasonal but sometimes other stuff
Did they learn nothing from giving everyone a free U2 album that nobody wanted, and the backlash from that?
I think this is a lot worse than the U2 thing. Operating systems bundle free stuff all the time. Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
This damn U2 album still appears in my smart playlists in Apple Music from time to time - it is insane that I can’t delete it completely so many years later.
Apparently they removed the removal tool in 2018, you now have to contact Apple Support to get it removed.
> you now have to contact Apple Support to get it removed.
I just checked, and I can delete it from my library the same way I can delete any other album.
Thanks for the tip! I’d given up on deleting this crap. Glad to see it works now, good riddance!
It was only able to be removed after the backlash. Apple had to build a tool for it, and users had to be connected to tech media enough to know that existed. And if they didn’t do it already, it’s too late.
That doesn’t sound easily removed to me.
The U2 episode is a perfect example of something that went unnoticed by people who already used iTunes heavily, but became a major pain point for anyone who didn’t already have a large library on their phone.
If your iTunes was filled with songs, it got lost in the noise. This probably describes all of the Apple employees who thought it was a good idea.
If your iTunes was empty, U2 became that annoying song that played by default when you connected your phone to your car for any reason or other systems that played music by default. For years I can remember this happening to people in random situations and then everyone around would groan.
Completely disagree, for many people it was the only track in iTunes. And when things triggered iTunes to play it played that.
I was in an older man’s car last year. It started playing the album. He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.
A decade later that album is still annoying people. Bluetooth triggered play or something like that and the only music on the old iPhone started playing.
I’ve met so many people who only have that one album on their devices, and it plays every time they plug into their car or connect via Bluetooth. And they are all just annoyed/accepting of it. My wife was one of them. And what made it worse was you couldn’t just pause it: with her car’s particular head unit, anything you touched (like the volume control) would cause the head unit to issue another “play music” command to restart it. Eventually enough was enough and I figured out how to remove the album for good.
If I'm reading all this correctly, it sounds like Apple has a system that will automatically play unintended music at various times from the music library. The only way to prevent this is to completely wipe out the entire library.
And the chief complaint is that there is an album in the library.
> If I'm reading all this correctly, it sounds like Apple has a system that will automatically play unintended music at various times from the music library.
No, in this case the play command was coming from the attached device. Apple’s product was complying with the command in the only way it could, by playing the songs in the library.
Of course it's not the only way to comply. The more sensible default is to continue playing whatever's in your queue. So if you had nothing there, noting would play.
That’s right. Various connected devices are over-eager to assume the user wants to play media, and command the phone into do so unexpectedly. This is fine if there is no media to play, but then all of a sudden, thanks to Apple’s decision, there was unwanted media to play, and this album would be the one always playing.
So the album didn’t cause the problem but it revealed it.
Both are annoying as hell, but people found a workaround, and that album screws it again.
But yes, it's still the insult on top of the injury.
If I'm reading correctly, the bug is in the car's audio control system.
Most cars work this way so phone makers should design around that.
Because the presence of that album is what creates this bug and the user never purchased or downloaded it themself.
I have this same problem but it plays my wedding playlist from nearly 20 years ago. Some terribly annoying song I no longer like. I assume it’s too much work to delete my library and so I just deal with the annoyance.
If it annoyed them that much they’d have rung apple support and gotten it removed. I agree it’s bad and they shouldn’t have done it, but after a decade you have to accept some personal responsibility for it, if I bought a shoe and a rock was inside from factory and my foot hurt for 10 years at some point some of your current suffering is your own fault for not removing it lol
My partners young niece dislikes U2 and apple for that move. She said a lot of her friend are the same. It was a bad move. They should have just made the album free and not pushed it to every device.
Apple did give away free videos on the old Mac OS install cds like widows did. I think to show off quick time and that your computer can play videos (back when that was newish). They didn’t install onto you hard drive..
He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.
I use Spotify in the car, and have for years. A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of saying, "Hey, Siri, play liked songs."
"OK, playing Apple Music."
Oh, well, yet another spark of genius from the tire fire that is Siri. Whatever. I switched back to Spotify manually and went on with my day.
Since then, every time I get in the car it starts playing tracks on Apple Music. No matter how many times I relaunch Spotify, even after force-closing the Apple Music app on the phone itself, Apple Music keeps coming back.
If there is a way to get it to properly resume the playback state at shutdown time, I'm not smart enough to find it. 100% pure unadulterated enshittification... courtesy of Apple, the company with "taste."
> Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.
Lol I had completely forgotten about that, thanks for reminding me. Going to have to find a copy with that lovely MPEG blocky quality.
It was such a long time ago that the people who made the mistake have already retired, maybe.
Most of the top management from that time is the same people today.
U2 stunt was Jobs' idea. He was a life-long fan of them.
Edit - it wasn't, my bad, see below.
The U2 album happened under Cook.
https://www.rnz.de/cms_media/module_img/176/88193_1_detailxs...
Bah, my bad.
This happened in 2014 and Jobs passed in 2011.
Didn’t the U2 stunt happen three years after Steve Jobs died?
I am probably not the average computer user. I didn’t even receive this notification, but just reading about this makes me reconsider switching my devices from Apple to open source software. I have every possible ad blocked and I have been a happy user of Apple devices so far. But this behavior feels so scammy and cheap, not worthy of a premium brand.
I feel like we need a CAN SPAM act that includes Smartphone notifications. And gatekeepers like Apple should probably simply be banned from placing any advertisements in push notifications.
The updates Microsoft has been making to add stuff the Windows lockscreen and start menu also seem like they should be at the least legally questionable.
And of course Google practically invented these things.
We just need to expand it to all forms of communication. Smartphone notifications, web notifications, phone calls, carrier pigeons, town criers and messages in a bottle. Doesn't matter what the medium is. If it is unsolicited commercial communication it shouldn't be allowed.
Don't forget billboards and similar advertisement space.
> I feel like we need a CAN SPAM act
I feel like we need a CANT SPAM act.
I got this ad, and ya, I was truly bewildered to get such an ad and then shocked that it came from my Wallet. I then spent the next hour searching how to disable this new marketing stream and it looks like nothing can be done. Anyway, glad to see I’m not alone here.
They have added an option to disable marketing messages in the wallet app..... in the new iOS 26 beta. which uh, really makes it look like they were not planning on doing this just this once.
This is what it looks like, the switch is for "Offers & Promotions": https://i.imgur.com/wodOoBo.jpeg
From the Wallet app, tap on "…" at the top right, then "notifications".
I ended up buying tickets but the Fandango checkout flow had so many pitfalls that I doubt this converted very many people .At least 10 screens including one saying “sorry you can’t use Apple Pay to redeem the coupon” (you had to go through a further checkout and then choose Apple Pay ).
They burned a lot of goodwill over a low conversion campaign. It reminds me of the U2 album that they snuck onto everyone’s phones, but even tackier .
This company really is turning into the new IBM or something. No innovation whatsoever and more and more money squeezing the users.
I'm sad they make the only decent laptop out there, for everything else I'm glad to be out their crap wallet garden.
You could say this about all the large tech companies now. They're all just boring Megacorps.
NVIDIA is fairly unique and interesting.
Apple also pushed a notification through the AppleTV app. I thought I had all notifications turned off (I turn off notifications from most apps on all devices, just because you think I need to see your messages doesn't mean I think that and most apps do not need notifications). Quite irritating. That was the point where I decided I would not see F1 in theaters, and if I ever do it'll be free streaming.
You may never see it because Apple holds all of the streaming rights.
As I've said for the last ten years about Apple and ads, as soon as the momentum slows down, they will put ads everywhere and sell your data next if it keeps revenue growth up.
This year for the first time I started carrying an Android along with my iPhone. I've had Apple phones exclusively since I got my first smartphone in 2012, and before now never had a wandering eye. But the moves Apple has made lately make me realize it is time to make sure I'll have a ripcord to pull if I need one.
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
The irony is Apple is spending a fortune on their Secure with Apple marketing campaign, the one that ends with the Apple logo turning into a lock that clicks shut, and they’ve undone that, plus some, with the F1 campaign. This is a blunder of epic proportions and is illustrative of a company no longer in touch with their core identity and principles.
I think its rather telling about the state of Apple that Gruber has posted some fairly negative (for him) posts in the last few months.
This is coming from a guy who generally fawned over every new iterative release as if it was revelatory for 20 years.
But admittedly, they still have the only good laptop on the market
Downvoted but you aren't wrong. "Good laptop" meaning "few or no compromises" on EVERY component in the device.
> That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?
Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising. Companies ultimately serve whoever they make their money from; and none of the other big tech players have a comprehensive business model where the end user is the customer instead of the product.
And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.
The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
> And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
I just want to highlight this because Hacker News can be incredibly dismissive about this.
Apple’s focus on privacy is a competitive advantage. Consumers value it, and Apple’s competitors have business models that undermine it.
Even if you think Tim Cook is the literal devil and Apple will do absolutely anything for a buck, Apple’s focus on privacy is still relevant.
Privacy is valuable to Apple. It’s a wedge they can use against their competitors. Google doesn’t make their fortune selling hardware, they make it selling ads. Privacy is something that gets in the way of Google’s profits.
Because Apple are in this position, it’s profitable to them to champion privacy. It’s something they can do that’s valuable to customers that their competitors are at a disadvantage with.
You don’t have to be a fan of Apple, and you don’t have to trust Apple. All you have to do is believe they want to make money. Being pro-privacy is profitable to Apple, and so they act accordingly.
I disagree with you. I think the majority of Apple's promises are purely marketing. And this is a moment where the mask has slipped. Your account does not allow for the case where Apple can successfully convince their users that they are privacy-oriented while simultaneously not being privacy oriented.
A great example of this is that they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken. An actual privacy-centric product, this would be a major problem. Consider Signal.
Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
There is no giant moat between Apple and privacy violation. They'll do it whenever they feel like it, and Apple customers are very forgiving.
> they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken.
It’s not completely broken. For average users, erring on the side of being able to restore from backup is the best choice. For people who need more security, that’s what Advanced Data Protection is for. You have the choice of which option suits you best; I think the default is appropriate for typical users.
> Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
What happened was they put a huge amount of effort into building a system that goes as far as it possibly can to implement CSAM detection that could work on E2E encrypted photo libraries while maintaining as much privacy as possible.
The design of the feature demonstrates they put a lot of effort into privacy – competitors just scan everything that’s uploaded to them, while Apple went above and beyond to do something a lot more difficult. The entire point of it was to detect without Apple having to have access to your photo library. There’s no point to design a system like that if they weren’t prioritising privacy – they could just scan on the server like everybody else if privacy isn’t a priority.
And what happened – everybody freaked out anyway, so they cancelled the feature. It’s an example that supports my point. Apple respond to incentives.
Personally, I wish they hadn’t cancelled the feature. Virtually everybody complaining about it didn’t understand how it worked and thought it worked in a completely different way.
I sense that you're arguing in good faith, but your first argument is very strange.
The purpose of end-to-end encryption is that the messages cannot be read even by Apple. This is a feature that they advertise in their webpage about iMessage security.
All I'm saying is that a bunch of people believe that iMessage supports end-to-end encryption and at the same time know that their messages are encrypted by a key that Apple holds and can decrypt them with via iCloud backup.
That's quite literally marketing a privacy-centric product and having the reality (for the vast majority of users using the defaults) be substantially different than what was promised.
To put it even more starkly, Apple advertises that they can't read your messages, and yet they can.
- iMessage supporting E2E encryption is a good thing.
- The right choice for the average user is to prefer recoverable backups.
- Recoverable backups undermine E2E encryption.
- Apple provides Advanced Data Protection which disables a bunch of things like recoverable iCloud backups in favour of more secure measures.
Apple deciding that ADP is not appropriate for the average user does not mean that “their promises are purely marketing”. They implemented it. It’s real. You can switch ADP on at any time. It’s just not the default, for good reason.
The incident we are discussing absolutely disproves this! Apple is happy to jeopardize privacy and the very idea of it, for a quick buck blasting an ad to all its users. They don't care one way or the other.
But the truth is, nobody really cares about privacy, least of all, users. Nobody ever bought an iPhone because of "privacy"; people buy iPhones because they work, and because they seem cool. Everyone's happy to hand over data to any service.
Facebook has three billion users.
The reason why even the most die-hard Apple fans are up in arms about this is because it’s such a break from Apple’s normal standards. It’s the exception that proves the rule. This harms Apple more than it benefits them.
No, it proves that large organizations have competing priorities and that they can make bad decisions.
So if Apple really cares about privacy, their products send less telemetry than my Linux system, correct?
I agree with this point as well. I had the privilege of talking to a telemetry ingestion engineer at Apple, and I learned quite a bit about the amount of data they collect on their users. It's absolutely staggering.
> So if Apple really cares about privacy
This is a complete misunderstanding of what I was saying. I wasn’t arguing that Apple “really cares” about privacy; quite the opposite – I was arguing that it doesn’t matter if Apple “really cares”, what matters is that they are financially and strategically incentivised to be pro-privacy.
Linux is not Apple’s competitor. Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.
> Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.
Yeah, that's the sad thing. And on mobile their only competitor is Google... so they don't have to be really good at privacy.
[flagged]
The op wasn’t arguing that there was some moral difference between apple and google. They were arguing an incentive difference.
And there is one! If you don’t recognize that you yourself are subject to some sort of distortion field.
Obviously that incentive difference doesn't work. Otherwise Apple would be happy with being paid, while not making users the product. Cable TV is another example of this non-working incentive difference. It just takes longer, because the paying users need to be slowly dragged along into advertisement hell.
> Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising.
have you used the app store in the last few years?
I search for my bank and the first results are a load of scammy crypto app ads
then my actual bank app is at result number 3
this is the sort of behaviour I would have expected from Google
The fact that they make money doing something doesn't stop hungry PMs and VPs from pushing other revenue sources.
Amazon used to sell us items, now ad sales are a big part of their storefront's revenue. Cable used to not have ads.
If you aren't paying, you are the product doesn't also imply that if you paying you are definitely not the product. To the modern exec, everything and everyone is the product. I an surprised that gig economy apps aren't also selling the eyeballs of their workers, making them watch ads to work.
> Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising.
and by selling ads, seriously, just open their app store.
> And because it has positioned itself
And they can continue that while simultaneously doing the opposite. There is no law against inconsistent behavior
> Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
Yes, of course, that's easy to find via a 5 sec google search
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/12/24128640/microsoft-window...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23712440/gmail-ads-more-an...
Apple needs to show revenue growth every single year. Their hardware and services businesses will eventually tap out, and then they'll start mining their users for data and advertising. It's a miracle they've managed to avoid it for so long, but they will eventually be forced to. It will probably coincide with Tim Cook's retirement, unfortunately.
> lack of openness
Lack of openness means lack of privacy. If we can't install apps on the side that have proper adblock filtering, then all the promises in the world are hollow.
Lack of openness means a lack of privacy in theory, but in practice, openness often results in less privacy. The average user lacks the knowledge, time, and motivation to install and configure open systems to maximize privacy. They're likely to make mistakes that expose private data.
A closed system that prioritizes privacy will result in more users benefiting from greater privacy overall, even if it does give the platform more control than is ideal. And that's the issue with the wallet ads: Apple makes users more secure on average, but it depends on user trust, which it just betrayed.
Those who can take advantage of total control are a minority, and they are not really the people Apple cares about.
Such a false dichotomy that open automatically means insecure and leaky due to user error.
Sensible defaults and warnings about changing them is all you need to put any argument of 'bad for privacy' down.
It’s not a dichotomy, but an observation about how data privacy tends to work in the real world. You can easily refute it with practical examples of how openness has actually improved privacy for the average user relative to Apple’s closed, managed privacy programs. Would an average non-technical Apple user be exposed to higher or lower security and privacy risk if they moved from Apple platforms to open platforms?
A non-open system is not verifyable and therefore not trustable. Therefore a non-open system can never deliver privacy. At best it can attempt to trick you into believing it does.
Risk isn’t an absolute. Open systems may be verifiable, but they are also more difficult to use, inconvenient, and lack the features users want. So most people won’t use them or will use them badly. Apple reduces privacy risk relative to open solutions used by non-expert users. The purist approach to privacy increases risk to ordinary users. It’s better to be pragmatic; Apple isn’t ideal, but it’s better than the realistic alternatives.
Privacy and advertising are not mutually exclusive.
Privacy is also about having control over your own space, both physically and digitally, and being free from unwanted intrusion or interference.
For me, such a notification is an unwanted intrusion, and it is not compatible with privacy.
Privacy and targeted advertising are, which is the name of the game
Advertising on old style TV, newspapers, billboards did not impact on privacy. Even non targeted advertising on the web can impact privacy because our browsers send requests to the ad servers and that's the beginning of fingerprinting, even with Javascript disabled.
The only way it would work on the web while fully preserving privacy would be if (1) ads were stored on the server of the website you're accessing or proxied by it, and (2) the website owner would never give the ad provider server logs. It can be done (and used to be).
When i first got into web hosting in the early noughties this is how i remember it being done. Want to advertise my game server on some site? Provide an image url and a link url. That was it.
This is technically correct, but supporting examples are statistically insignificant.
Quoting from https://www.apple.com/privacy/:
"Privacy. That’s Apple.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."
So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.
Privacy. Except when you want to install software on a computer you own, then Apple has to know about it and approve of it. That's Apple.
It's wild to me they would claim privacy as some human right while making the only computer in the world you can't actually control without their involvement.
That's true until it isn't, just like "Don't be evil" was for Google.
From industry analysis:
"Apple does have a traditional advertising business, and it does appear to be growing: The folks at Business Insider's sister company EMarketer think it will hit $6.3 billion this year, up from $5.4 billion last year.
And that's not nothing. For context: That's more than the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter generated in 2021, its last full year before Elon Musk bought the company; it's also more than the $4.6 billion Snap generated in 2023."
The article goes on to specify it's only 6% of Apple revenue. But 20% comes from Google and looking at how the antitrust trials are going, that source may soon dry up. The logical conclusion is Apple will aggressively move to make up for the loss by exploiting their captive audience.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-sea...
"advertises" is the key word here
Marketing.
I have a fundamental fear that Apple will lose itself the day it chases profits with Ads.
If I wanted Ad spam I would've used Google.
> Apple will lose itself the day it chases profits with Ads
That shipped sailed many years back. Apple runs a highly successful ad network. It is just that most people are slowly starting to realize the true colors of the company.
They already make lots of money from ads on the App Store homepage and search. Small developers like me have a hard time competing when there's megacorps spending millions on App Store ads to rank higher.
"Like, what if you recently bought tickets to see another summer blockbuster movie? Using Apple Wallet? And then you got this ad? It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you."
I am not in anyway agreeing with the tracking of people's activities and purchases, but if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.
Any choice of wallet app, or ecosystem (ie iOS or Android) will not make any difference.
> if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.
[citation needed]
Did we ever find out what happened at Mozilla that allowed that trust-destroying Mr. Robot advertisement to happen? There seems to be a trend (n=2) of Marketing spending consumer trust for one-time media engagement clicks.
Not in detail afaik. The impression I got was that they somehow just didn't consider that people not looking for it would notice, and per the statement at the time (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/retrospective-looking-gl...) the review process was too focused on privacy vs the big picture.
Yeah, that’s the non-answer post that I remember. Ah well.
I'm glad that people are mad about this. I got the ad, went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was. I was kind of surprised.
For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.
> went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44368854
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44371872
> Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
As it so happens I’m using my framework laptop with fedora linux almost exclusively at this point. That was not the case a year ago. :)
I was watching the Phillies game the other day, like I usually do, except it was Friday, so Apple owns the rights to the game. It's not the usual announcers, but fine, I can watch it on Apple TV+.
I remember getting a commercial for Ed Sheeran's new song for Apple's new F1 Movie which I can listen to on Apple Music and just ask Siri to play it and wanting to throw the remote at the TV. Apple just really wants to watch baseball with me. I prefer my crappy local OTT ads.
Apple seems to have lost its way. I feel the only reason they still advertise Privacy is that they're stuck with it at this point, or they'd be another Samsung or Google.
I miss the world when Apple had a point of view and vision that served to move things forward, not just stocks/revenue up.
I'm trying to remember if anyone complained like this about the Apple Card offers in Apple Wallet. For some reason advertising their credit card is completely fine, but advertising their movie is where people get out the pitchforks? Not defending either, I think both are egregious. I just think it's interesting.
Microsoft recently pushed Minecraft movie backgrounds for Teams users, including Enterprises
They’ve had Minecraft backgrounds in teams for a while, since 2020 or 2021 at least
> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private. I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.
Spot on. Look at it this way: would SJ have allowed this to happen? Absolutely not. And if it somehow had happened while he were still there, he would've unquestionably (and quickly) fired the responsible parties.
I thought they learn their mistakes from the time they gave a U2 album for free on iTunes (but forcing everyone on iTunes to have it). It’s the same thing here but worst with ads. Pushing their stuff in our personal apps and lives without our permission, free stuff or not. But they still made the same mistake…
It actually only sent the notification if it detected in your wallet you had enough to cover 1 x ticket from your local theatre. If you didn't, the Notes app will notify you once it is free on streaming.
Chinese phones show ad in notifications, obviously Americans see it, get jealous (what a difficult spelling!) and want to do the same.
Chinese phones are way more aggressive in showing ads. They have graduated to showing ads via the Live Activities feature, or push notifications with the Time Sensitive bit on to bypass Do Not Disturb.
There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s
They are also marketing “nearby” coffee shops in the Home Screen stack widget which is pretty invasive, I’m surprised not to hear about it
They're not. The Maps widget shows you nearby businesses. You can remove the widget.
Turns out they are
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/p147sn/apps_like_yelp_...
My maps widget randomly took me to some BS Apple movie scene location with a bunch of movie branding right in the maps UI. There was nothing nearby about it. It was like two continents away from me.
so, they're not and you can remove the thing that doesn't exist?
So - the gruber shadowban has been lifted eh?
What’s this referring to? What drama did I miss?
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...
Is there any proof for that or just a case of sour blogger?
Thank you!
That's what I thought as well :D
> destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, to get users to believe that it’s private. That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?
John Gruber has long been an Apple advocate, not saying this to detract from this post, but rather to add context to those who do not know this.
This stupid ad is officially the end of an era. Apple died.
Living in Asia for a while, this stuff is so mild... all these "super-apps" are always so annoying with cross-promotions that are impossible to turn off. It's true that they are usually not yet having root level access.
Asian here, always surprised when these apps keep putting their money into those promotions and getting almost nothing back in results.
because it's one of the only apps i've not disabled notifications for. you could've muted already tv+ ,mail ,stocks ,news ,fitness ,whatever. but not wallet cuz you leave that on for flights ,covid passes ,payments ,and some legit actions.
I know the "what would Steve say" thing is tired, but seriously you can just imagine him on stage:
"And ads in the operating system? YUCK."
Reminds me of the push of U2's 'Songs Of Innocence" into everyone's iPhones maybe 10 years ago.
Feels like a small thing, but it’s definitely a shift in tone. Curious if this becomes a trend in Apple’s UI decisions moving forward.
If Apple starts putting ads everywhere, I might as well switch to Android and save myself a thousand bucks every three years.
I feel vindicated for when I said that the moment Apple's line stops growing, they'll resort to monetizing their users like the rest of big-tech to increase their shareholder returns, and everyone here was like "Nooo, my sweet innocent publicly traded trillion dollar corporation would never betray me like that". Give it a few more years love, now they're boiling the frog.
What do you mean start monetizing ? I get adds for their Apple Arcade trial on top of my iOS settings main screen.
I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
I don't really understand, I don't get ads on my Android phone?
And I'm not sure what you mean about ecosystems either, yes you do need a Google account to download apps from the Play store, but you also need an Apple account to use the Apple store as far as I know.
In my experience it's easier to create a second Google account than a second Apple account.
Now I'm not representative of most users, like all HN users probably. But at home, apart from my M1 Mac (running Linux because I hate macOS) my other machines are Intel n100-based. They work fine.
Android is preloaded with different flavor of crap depending on the vendor and side-loading a phone OS and dealing with everything - I just don't have the energy these days. Likewise for running Linux on top of a M series Apple device. My devices just work and they all work together - all I have to do is login to the same account. My phone shares stuff with my Mac without any setup - shared clipboard, apps, storage. Buds connect to all my devices, Mac Mini, MadBook, iPad - not just 2 BT devices at a time, and they switch seamlessly. Stuff that saves me time and just does what I want. And all of the devices are usually among the best in class individually.
Nobody outside of Apple even has that as a vision. Microsoft is so bad at building consumer products it's unbelievable. Google is struggling to build compiling phones with its own software - I doubt they can execute on other device types. Valve did a relatively small investment in this ecosystem and brought it forward light years in the gaming space.
For the desktop, I could probably just use Linux, but you're right, in terms of eco-system, where would I go?
Phones are even worse. You basically stuck on iOS and Android and I honestly see no situation where picking Android wouldn't be worse. You have a better selection of phone, and you could run /e/OS, Calyx, or something else, but that's just a hassle. I'm not a big fan of the direction iOS is developing, it tried to do way to much and the UI has become a mess.
There are also GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone).
Graphene OS?
Graphene, Calyx, /e/OS... they work and you can install apps from the Play Store, the feedback I got is just that the few apps I need that can't be replaced keeps breaking. It's just more of a hassle than I'm willing to endure. But you right, it is an option.
Do you must have banking apps in your phone? And even if you do, do you need them so often that the apps must be installed in your daily driver?
No, actually I don't because my banks app is awful, but my mobile payment app isn't any good if it's not on my phone.
I think banking apps don't play well with it.
In the event that I have to deprecate my current Android, I might have a go at installing Graphene and trying it out in various countries.
You are correct that, just like in politics, you have to pick the best among problematic choices, which will often be Apple.
Isn't politics famous for moralizing inherently immoral decisions, such that people forget how to engage in constructive discourse and resign themselves to tribalism? Doesn't that process inherently degrade the quality of both politics and technology?
Maybe I'm alone, but one of the few reasons I care about technology is to not treat it like politics or fairy magic.
> The M Pro series processor (...)
even if it were the best processor to ever exist, it's not something that we can not live without.
> Linux is a part time job
It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.
>It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.
I daily drove fedora last summer for a few months and it was a joke on how unstable it was. Slack would crash when screen sharing, likewise for chrome/gmeet, camera corruption bugs. Just two days ago I was teasing a coworker on a daily that we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself. Chrome would randomly stop rendering all windows when watching YouToube in a separate window. KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable but had issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland (Plasma 6 supported this). Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs and trying stuff out, breaking my audio several times in the process. My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD. And this is all on a well supported desktop machine. Laptop and power management was even worse last time I tried it. Hell I never had a PC laptop that managed sleep state reliably and didn't cook the battery in the backpack randomly.
I just don't have these kinds of issues with MacOS. The processor/laptops are just best on the market and it just works, support is amazing. It is hard to justify dealing with Linux desktop and PC hardware even at a price premium, but these days Apple devices are even price competitive compared to similar windows/linux machines.
> It is hard to justify dealing with Linux desktop and PC hardware even at a price premium
There is only one justification that I need: Apple wants me in a golden cage, and I don't want to lose my freedom at any cost. No matter how much cheaper it can get, not matter how much "better" than the competition it is, it is not worth the price. I do not exchange my freedom for convenience, status or some materialistic joy. It's as simple as that.
All your arguments against Linux are at best circumstantial and at worst bogus. Of course it is not perfect. Of course it has limitations. But it's undeniable that the gap between FOSS and Windows/Apple is getting narrower and narrower, despite the FOSS side getting a minuscule fraction of the resources available to trillion dollar corporations.
And the really fucked up part is that You are the one claiming to "hate" Apple, yet you keep buying their products and making their market dominance ever stronger.
---
Just to address your "claims":
> we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself
Never had any issues of that sort, whether I was using Google Meet, Slack, Zoom or anything else.
> KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable
I've been using XFCE since 2010 (When Ubuntu went with Unity). It is not fancy and does everything I need.
> issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland.
It has been working fine on my Desktop and my Framework laptop for some good 3 years, when I actually bothered to look. Before that, I'd just go by through customization of window zoom levels (browser) and font-size (emacs, terminal, GTK apps).
> My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD
hum, too bad? How significantly was your quality of life affected by this? Curiously, I also use an LG monitor with AMD running at 4k/60Hz, and the fact that I am "missing out" on something here does not even cross my mind.
> Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs
Did you get it working? Was the software FOSS? Can you share your findings back with the developers and help them improve their product, or are you going to keep rationalizing the abusive relationship you're in because "at least things just work, most of the time".
The biggest trick they ever pulled was changing Music.app into Apple Music, and on first app start showing you a "hey, want to try Apple Music? Tap here" fullscreen.
That single-handedly unlocked a huge cohort of boomers and other tech laypeople that had never tried Spotify or any other music streaming platform before.
It was smart and also a huge abuse of market power. Apple Music would have bombed without it. The only reason they didn't get in deep shit for it was that Apple doesn't have nearly the market capture in the EU that they have in the US, and in that time period the US didn't do antitrust against tech companies.
The worse abuse of market power there is that Apple Music doesn't have to pay the 30% to the app store for subscriptions made on the device, but but spotify etc do, so Spotify can't charge a comparable price on iOS, and also wasn't allowed to tell the user in the app that they can subscribe for $x online.
Deceptive app naming has nothing on that.
As shitty as it is, Chromeos doesnt seem to have a lot bloatware to me.
Does it not have a huge slew of pre-installed Google apps that can't be uninstalled like Android phones?
> and everyone here was like
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
Ah, sweet vindication. Eventually the only company that doesn't do (all the) bad thing will start doing bad thing.
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
> but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future
No, but you should be always ready to jump the ship, always research reasonably good alternatives and never go deep in their walled garden. Ideally, you could even support the efforts to bring the freedom with your money or time, like GNU/Linux phones.
Android apps blatantly misuse notifications to push inane ads and promotions
Android provides a "notification categories" setting where user can trun some type of notifications on and other off.
Most apps I use fall into two or three buckets --
1. There is just one "default" notifications category ... so it is all or nothing.
2. There are a few categories named very vaguely with no way to actually discern what is useful and what is junk, and they also use them inconsistency.
3. There are tons and tons of notifications categories - list keeps changing frequently - so There is no way you can set and forget. So whatever you may do, ads still sneak through.
Where/how can we start pushing back on this irresponsible behaviour and shame these billion dollar brands for abusing customers and treating us like fools.
If someone has already given this form of abuse a name and a prominent online post -- maybe we could make it more popular and raise awareness.
I think Apple may be in the process of being enshittified. Stuff like this, their complete failure to do anything useful with AI, the anti-accessibility of a Liquid Glass, and the simple observation of how many things in the Apple ecosystem don’t “just work” is making me feel like giving up on it.
I spend an enormous amount of money on Apple products, and increasingly they lead to frustration and anger at the thoughtlessness and plain shittiness of them. I’m really wondering why I bother. They clearly don’t have my interests in mind.
A
This is why i have ALL notifications disabled, no matter the app. Companies, including apple, cannot help themselves but abuse it. Which is insane because it's a useful part of the phone functionality that I have to entirely disable because of greedy disrespectful companies. And there are no controls given to put us back in control.
Apple has lost their taste and lost their respect for users.
I got this ad too.
I increasingly use wallet for everything - multiple credit cards, show tickets, transit tickets.
Is there an alternative? Android?
I use Google Wallet for some things because I am an Android user, and sometimes the most convenient way to pay for shit online is using the mobile wallet. I just happen to hate Apple more than I hate Google.
That said, both Apple and Google are shit companies that should jot be trusted with this. I with there was a third option
Also, please not FB. I have to be careful with what I wish sometimes.
By default, the home screen of an Apple TV shows video ads for Apple subscription content, also.
Ads are annoying but I at least understand that on Apple TV you'd see ads for entertainment content. Having it show up in Wallet is a complete disconnect.
and in the maps widget
They did what?
Spot on!
C'mon, it's not like they dumped a complete album in your music collection!
I’ve held the opinion as an Apple Fan for the better half of the last decade that Apple is lost. When looking at their product decisions and what they’ve decided to ship, it shows.
- iPad is a confusing array of what that device is for. Is it for professional creators? Or consumers? Is it a PC? Or is it a mobile device? For the first time since its inception, it got a window manager at WWDC25. And yet, no support for any other apps outside of the App Store (EU excepted). Not a single creative professional uses it in the workplace. Not a single engineer uses it for development. And yet, a 11 iPad Pro with the trackpad+keyboard is more expensive and less capable than an M1 Macbook
- iPhone: They are absolutely scared to change anything on here because the current culture at Apple is one of "do not change what brings us the most profits". Year over year small improvements, and rising phone costs. OS 26 brought about... a confusing design change. And while some analysts are fooled into thinking that this is preparation for their VR glasses, and even if that was remotely true (it's not) the analysts forgot that half transparent displays still obscure your vision. So that's not it.
- Developer experience. There was recently a post on Hacker News about how the developer exhausted every avenue and was left with OS level behavior that only Apple could change or fix. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901619 The comments ripped Apple apart. And you know what the response was? Apple finally helped them. But look at the second blog post where the developer posted it's resolved now. Not a single detail. They signed NDAs, and the post was essentially "we can't give any details because secrecy, but Apple helped us. They're great!". I can guarantee you 100% Apple forced their hand, and in fact Phil Schiller has said publicly that they are not willing to help you if you "cry to the press".
Xcode reviews on the Mac App Store are scathing. Swift? Chris Lattner left months after Apple released Swift. And at the time it seemed like he just wanted to focus on something else. The details of why he left at the time was very hidden and hush hush. And guess what? It's come out in the Swift forums. https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr...
Horrible.
Performative nonsense. Their events are full of carefully chosen words and phrases that showcase a dead culture. One where you can't have any creativity beyond the new presenters and their fashion. Awkward corporate events that aren't fun anymore to watch as they release mundane features like "shake your mouse to make the cursor bigger!".
AI? They spent 2 years removing the "hey" from "hey Siri". Everytime you turn off Apple Intelligence, a software update will force it back on. It still can't handle simple queries. And the UX even more confusing. There's a lot to lambaste in this department, but all of it has been said already. WWDC25 didn't address any of it. The interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak was even more awkward and telling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEkK1YzqBo
I want Apple to be good. I want them to make great products again. I want them to innovate. But I guess I'm the fool for wanting a corporate entity to be good and cool.
> That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
This is pure nonsense. From someone with the experience to know better. It's amazing to me that people could say this out loud.
> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private.
The "perception of privacy" is _all you have_. You don't even have access to the technical details!
> I’m 99.9 percent certain this F1 ad was just blasted out to zillions of Wallet users indiscriminately
Stop making excuses for the trillion dollar gorilla in the room with you. You don't understand it. You've anthropomorphized it to a point of pathos. It's going to rip your arms off. It's just a matter of time.
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Even if I wanted to see that movie, I would refuse to watch it purely because I received an unsolicited ad in the Wallet app.
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> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private.
Well at least it’s acknowledged Apple privacy is only perception and not actually secure or private.
No, people really believe their nonsense marketing. The whole “FBI vs Apple” soap opera they cooked up after the San Bernardino shooting thing convinced a lot of people.
Meanwhile Apple preserves a backdoor in the iMessage end to end encryption (in the form of non-e2ee iCloud Backups) for the FBI.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-...
(iCloud e2ee availability is irrelevant; nobody has it enabled.)
> It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you.
Wait, there were/are people who believe Apple Wallet doesn't track them in some way?
Yes. Apple has a fairly good user security track record.
My fantasy is they create an entirely new product line called something like “Chunky” or maybe “Thiccc”. The idea is that it would have plenty of user replaceable modules. Everything would be swappable. The battery, the memory, the drives. Of course, this would still be a premium product. It would have expansion modules for things nobody has thought of yet. It’s a new market with unlimited opportunities
You should look up Google's Project Ara. I was really excited for it at the time (2014), but alas, it never made it to market.
Fairphone?
I think a conclusion has been leaped to that is not necessarily true.
If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.
It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.
I think the article rightly speaks of "trust-erosion" in connection with this incident because, in addition to the showing of ads being subject to the suspicion of surveillance, it raises the question how seriously we can take a wallet app that shows ads or does anything completely unrelated to its designated and propagated purpose, something that is not the reason why this app is used and in fact detracts everyone from the intended use of this app.
The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"
> If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store)
Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.
> then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?
That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.
> it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.
The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.
> But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.
Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.
I didn’t see any ads and nobody I know did. This may be a feature in ios26 (the next version in beta) that got leaked out to older versions? Ie a bug)
Ios26 specifically enables promotions in wallet which is viewed as a feature that can be enabled/disabled
Probably depends on where you live, or some other thing apple knows about you.
I saw the ad. iOS 18.5, in the Midwest, with notifications allowed for the Wallet app.
I didn’t find it too intrusive, but it was surprising. It’s probably not a road Apple wants to go further down.