YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!
It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?
ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.
And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original email for the purchase and click the link in there.
This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already bought in your own library it will promote different versions of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and really manipulative and really sucks!
Downloaded movies, books especially. Back then, ebooks were barely a thing(early 2000s), and scanned/OCR copies were the only way to get most books to read on a device.
I even contacted a few authors and sent them money directly via paypal.
But then the market matured. I bought what I could on Amazon. Exported to epub to read as I pleased.
Then the Kindle app became horrendous. Now exporting is not a thing. So I just pirate books again.
It's too much effort otherwise.
And on top of that, if people will only lease me a book, and not sell it (Amazon), I'm not paying either.
I do this even though my desktop display is a smart TV that's perfectly capable of streaming 4K content, because side-by-side display of app and HDMI content is not an option.
Speaking of which, how do Disney and other streaming providers benefit from blocking 4K streaming in browsers once the 4K version is readily available to torrent, often at higher Blu-ray bitrates? Is this part of some backroom deal with TV and streaming device vendors?
As for e-books, I only buy them if they're either DRM-free or DRM is easily strippable.
I also check out physical books, CDs, and Blu-ray discs from libraries when possible, not because I believe DRM on borrowed library materials is unfair per se, but because I don't agree with the business models it has enabled.
when you pirate them versus buying them: 1a. searching for them has become incredibly easy 1b. searching for them is easy as well
2a. putting them on multiple devices is incredibly easy 2b. depending on the store, then you're going to be restricted to a particular device or app
3a. ten years from now, you'll have the same copy you bought 3b. in the case of amazon, they might arbitrarily modify the copy you "own"
Setting up a system for tv shows is a bit cumbersome, and of course disk consuming, but with a little bit of knowledge you get an extremely good and reliable system.
I'm old now, I've got disposable income, I'm morally inclined to pay book authors but the stores and systems make the experience so completely unpleasant that I rarely use them.
Pirating everything is easier than buying, copyright owners have firmly adopted this mindset. It keeps swinging across the line of comfort up and down over the decades and these days its mostly back down. Games don't have OS Ring 0 level denuvo style crap making your computer more vulnerable and slower, and these days all big ones have all patches available pretty quickly after release. Plus sometimes its good to wait few days before applying if its not a disaster, instead of auto-update.
Remember those unskippable FBI warnings in beginning of official movies? Unknown in pirated version. Even these days with say Netflix stuff that is in EU, but isn't in Switzerland (or it is but only in german voiceover, even though I live in french part FFS. Where is original voice? Who knows). Movies keep disappearing from collection. I know, not a fault of Netflix as much as copyright owners, but at the end I don't care. So I have 10 TB local drive, 1080p/4K in quality I prefer, with audio and subs I prefer.
Music - nothing beats local collection of flacs, I can listen to them on plane or elsewhere without any signal (or half around the world with no good roaming), top quality streamed via aptx lossless to Sennheiser plugs, absolute top. For discovery free Spotify is enough, not forking 20 bucks for me & my wife monthly, thats a ridiculous sum just for (average quality) music.
Books - I feel like if I buy/bought I would be re/buying them over my life numerous times, collection stability and ease of use of shops isn't something I trust long term. I agree with all you write above.
You can also download up to 10,000 songs per device for offline use, which should be enough for a plane ride
I can see other issues one might have with Spotify, but I don’t really think those are among them. I’ve had it for about 15 years, and I’ve been consistently happy with it for my own use
Misconception: perfect conditions are what lossy codecs are designed for. You're actually more likely to hear compression artifacts under imperfect conditions that break the assumptions of psychoacoustic masking. Examples include strongly distorted frequency response from poor speakers, accidental comb filtering from room reflections, or even merely listening through a home surround sound system that matrix-decodes a stereo signal into additional channels, thus spatially isolating sounds that were assumed to be masked.
At this point it is obvious that every piece of content worth pirating mysteriously ends up locked behind the “we hired an enterprise consultant who has never used a computer” user experience. Which means pirating is not stealing, it is simply undoing a curse. I used to think taking someone’s work without permission was wrong. But now I understand that if they make me click more than two times or sign up for an account that wants my blood type, the theft automatically becomes a principled act of civil disobedience. Robin Hood with magnet links.
My friend tried to ruin this beautiful moral architecture I’ve built. He goes, “You’re just lying to yourself. This is motivated reasoning. People justify actions after doing them so they don’t feel guilty.” Then he starts rattling off psychological terminology like he’s been waiting his entire life to use the phrase “post-hoc rationalization” in a sentence. He even said cognitive dissonance while maintaining full eye contact, which should honestly be illegal outside of a grad seminar or a cult.
He’s like, “You want the thing. Then you explain to yourself why it was okay to take the thing.”
And I was like: Wow. Incredible. Thank you, professor Brain Surgeon PhD of Human Morality and Meme Piracy. Please invoice me for the lecture. I’ll pay you in exposure and a strongly worded moral shrug.
Because here is the truth:
I am not justifying anything. I am suffering. I am enduring the emotional hardship of navigating a UI that looks like it was designed in Microsoft Access by someone who hates joy. Do you understand the courage it takes to ignore that Buy Now button and instead go spelunking into the digital underworld like I’m Indiana Jones but for PDFs?
This is not theft. This is archaeology.
And yes, sometimes what I excavate is a folder labeled “S04E01–S04E23 (WEB-DL 2160p)” with subtitles and commentary tracks that legally shouldn’t exist. But that is not piracy.
That is restoration of cultural heritage.
The Library of Alexandria burned. I’m simply making sure Season 4 doesn’t.
The first is people who don't have the money, e.g. students. They will never pay you; they don't have the money.
The second is people who do have the money but value the experience above other things. These would be your best customers, if you provide the better experience.
If you don't provide the better experience, they don't pay. Is that a rationalization? Maybe, but are you better off to whinge about it or to take away their excuse?
The interesting question is psychological. How do you, personally, live with yourself while doing it? Why do people in this thread need to build entire theological systems of justification just to sleep at night?
That is the comedy here. Not the piracy. The denial.
Because if someone simply said, “Yes, I stole it because I wanted it and did not feel like paying,” I would respect that. Honesty. Integrity, even if dark.
But this thread is packed with people inventing ethical origami to explain why pressing the magnet link was actually a noble act of cultural preservation, spiritual support, intellectual necessity, or cosmic fairness. We are not talking about Kant. We are talking about a TV show and a PDF.
And then there is the classic justification play:
“I already bought the ebook on Kindle years ago. But I need a clean PDF to mark up on my iPad for research. Amazon will not give me a DRM free copy. I refuse to buy the same book twice. So I torrented a pristine academic version. I am simply aligning formats with my rightful ownership.”
The phrasing is beautiful. It sounds like a legal defense and a eulogy at the same time.
But think about it without the internet anesthesia. The bookstore will not give you a hardcover just because you bought the paperback once. You want the hardcover. So you go to the bookstore at night, slip a brick through the window, crawl in, take the hardcover, and walk out. You say to yourself on the way home, “I am merely aligning formats for research purposes.” People do not debate nuance when you break a window. They call the police. They call it theft.
Digital removes the broken glass. So people remove the guilt. They fill the empty space with story.
This is what I am calling out. Not piracy. Human psychology. The instinct to preserve self image at any cost. The inability to say a simple sentence:
I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Instead we get excuses from the Pirate Justification Vending Machine
I am archiving culture
I am previewing it
I will pay later
I support the creator emotionally
I did buy it once, in 2014, which grants eternal metaphysical ownership across all formats for all time including the direct brain injection edition in the year 2089
So yes, piracy happens. Yes, I do it too. The reason does not matter. But I am not delusional about it. I do not rename theft as cultural stewardship. I do not wrap it in story. I am a thief. Not a romantic one. Not a noble one. Just one who wanted a thing and took it. I can live with that truth.
The problem is not piracy. The problem is the lengths people will go to avoid looking in the mirror. The thread is not about economics. It is about ego protection.
And seeing adults twist themselves into philosophical pretzels to avoid saying a simple uncomfortable sentence is the funniest part of all of this.
Not the torrent.
The delusion.
The broken glass and the physical object are the actual difference in that case. The book store is paying for the glass and the unit cost of printing the hardcover.
You've diverged from criticizing rationalization of not paying to accusing someone who actually paid of doing something wrong. Now who is rationalizing the double dipping and copyrights that last so excessively long the medium they were released in becomes outmoded before they expire?
> I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
> Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
Easy. What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Either way. The topic of this thread is not about what would make me pay. That’s fucking obvious. The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
I’m a thief. I sail the high seas. Am I proud of it? No. But I’m not delusional about it like this entire thread.
So now you want to replace the things that aren't happening in the digital case with some other things that aren't happening in the digital case?
Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It's pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You'd make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials. Which doesn't seem nearly as objectionable as breaking into a bookstore or a house or stealing a physical object with a unit cost, because it isn't.
> What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
> The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
Oh I see. You think the physical break-in imagery is the problem, not the behavior itself. Cute. The point flew over your head so hard it’s now in low Earth orbit.
Nobody is saying the method is identical. The point is the moral equivalence. If you want a book that you do not have, and you obtain it without permission, the only difference between burglary and piracy is how easy it is to lie to yourself afterward.
Digital theft just comes pre-laundered. No broken window. No police report. Just a clean conscience and a folder named “Book_Final_FINAL2.pdf.”
>Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It’s pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You’d make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials.
Fantastic. And where exactly are you getting the paperback to copy, professor? Are you growing it in a hydroponic book farm? Summoning it from the astral plane? Wishing really, really hard?
To “make your own copy at home” you must first acquire the book. And if you do not buy it or borrow it, you steal it. Congratulations. You have just walked right back into the house at night with a scanner, only you changed the lighting and think the ethics changed with it.
The source is the theft. Not the printing method. This is not subtle. You are just allergic to saying it out loud.
>Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
Yes, and they do, and pirates still pirate. Spotify. Steam. Netflix. Apple Books. Kindle. Platforms with instantaneous, frictionless, brain-dead-simple purchasing flows already exist.
And people still torrent. Because the UX excuse was never the real reason. It was just the most socially presentable one.
People do not need better UX. They need better courage to say: “I wanted it and I took it.”
>Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
No. They were explaining how to preserve their self image while returning to piracy.
They were not saying: “I pirate.” They were saying: “I pirate but I am still a good person because I have constructed a beautiful little narrative terrarium where I am the protagonist of justice.”
This thread is not about piracy. It is about delusion.
⸻
Let me say it plainly so your brain has no escape hatch:
To read a book you do not have, you must obtain it. If you obtain it without permission in the physical world, you break in somewhere. If you obtain it without permission in the digital world, you click a link.
The click feels cleaner, so you tell cleaner stories.
The ethics never changed. Only the lighting did.
It is the same genre as:
“I am genuinely confused how someone could think this.” Translation: I am calling you stupid.
or
“This feels emotional rather than reasoned.” Translation: I have no counterargument.
You are not being kind. You are being condescending while wearing a cardigan of civility. It is the approved HN way of calling someone unwell without saying the word stupid directly. Very on brand. Very polite venom.
If you think my point is wrong, say why. If you cannot, do not hide behind a wellness check.
So yes, I am okay. Are you okay? Because it seems like making eye contact with your own reasoning gave you altitude sickness.
I use stremio with pirate plugins which provides basically an identical experience to Netflix. Don’t even need a setup.
I think you get it though. You use Usenet because you don’t want to pay right? Pure and simple.
The piracy setup costs far more to run the streaming services.
I do it for the quality and the all in 1 nature. I pay for the streaming services too, which makes me feel less bad about it. I should cut one or the other, but haven’t yet.
People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.
My nas has moved to a new house now three times. Even before i have internet setup in my new place, if i want to rewatch some old movie i dont check to see whether Apple or google still has it, i just open up VLC and find it right where i saved it on my nas a decade ago.
That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventually rot and become unplayable.
For example, for optical media the expected lifetime is only a couple of decades depending on the type of media [1]. I believe commercially pressed DVD and blueray are somewhere around 10-20 years.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con... , see table 2.
Some archival grade disc's are estimated to last 700 years or more and dont cost THAT much more.
DVD's and CDR'S used organic dies that broke down quickly. Blu-rays mostly use inorganic dies that last forever. Cheap LTH disc's being the exception.
MOST manufacturers like Verbatimm do not even produce the organic die LTH disc's anymore as people stopped buying them. There are still some floating around for sale, so avoid them.
The local library works much better still
Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're looking?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/a... [2] https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/contentlist/v... [3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/mystuff/library
The principle of torrents are, everyone downloading has the ip of all the other participants for p2p to work. All it takes is one node recording that other nodes send copywrited data to them, to get the real adresses of them (via ISP).
They hire dedectives to do that.
particularly tv shows, unless you really really want to keep them.
its not necessary to delete movies, IMO, as a 4k HDR 5.1 movie will go for about 30gbs. Not that much.
You don't have to click those.
Look up the brand perception of Amazon. It’s one of the highest in the business including high trust scores. High trust scores, for a company that sells counterfeit products! Perception is not reality.
Your average consumer (I.e., complete dumbass) barely recognizes advertisements and often reports enjoying them when they do recognize them. I can’t count how many people tell me that they see products advertised to them in Instagram that are exactly what they wanted/like.
When Steve Jobs ran Apple it was a niche premium computer company who had customers with above average incomes and education levels. It was different time. He died more than 10 years ago.
That’s not exactly what Apple is today. iPhones are used by over half of all Americans. You can’t really buy a decent computer that’s cheaper or a better value proposition than the previous generation MacBook Air $550 Walmart special.
As a side note, I would note that Apple Maps already has “ads,” because it has a Yelp integration. I think this whole thing is a part of removing that and bringing the same functionality in-house.
I think you’d be insane not to monetize Maps with Apple being the size that it is. It costs a huge amount of money to operate as a free service, and your median customer expects ads to be there.
If you want that niche, discerning customer experience, buy a Framework or System76: Linux has the same marketshare now that Apple had when Jobs returned to Apple.
Amazon for most of its history has had an extremely generous return policy. People don't trust them to send something good, they trust them to take it back if it's not.
Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)
Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.
I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).
iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
They only played nice during the time they were getting back into the game
Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted links but they're not as prominent.
The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite literally half the screen.
I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always* places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost less time to find out than writing this comment ;)
I just tried Things, Excel, Photoshop Elements, and Grand Theft Auto. Each was the first result.
So I guess YMMV on this.
Like you, I hate it when ads trump organic results.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
*.amp-api.books.apple.com
*.p2-buy.itunes.apple.com||amp-api.books.apple.com^ ||p2-buy.itunes.apple.com^
In AdGuard syntax, in case it saves someone time
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
Sub music with the thing you like.
Freaking heck, I've gotta dismiss ads on my BANKING APP just to deposit a check.
I disagree. They know exactly what they're doing. Executives get paid and promoted based on quarterly profitability, not long-term vision or a sustainable business model. By the time the damage from what they've done is apparent and felt, the execs responsible will have long since retired to a beach somewhere in the tropics, or taken a higher paying role at another company where they'll start the process anew.
Yes that is capitalism however if inflation cuts value of money in half and in the same time your revenue doubles, did you actually double your revenue? Do you even need to change your service or product to justify raising prices when the currency is being devalued? For both these questions there is a strong case that the answer is no.
Advanced users are already seeing this. You don't need HandBrake anymore. You can just use ffmpeg directly and ChatGPT will tell you the command line arguments.
I would rather stop using computers all together.
Hard no. Not happening.
Apple will follow along
As Jobs understood (per TFA), pushing ads degrades the user experience - the prime differentiating factor for Apple products in the first place, and what attracted many people to the platform.
It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as Apple's services businesses increase their share of revenue and exert expanding influence over product design within the company.
Banning Apple from leveraging its platform for advertising Apple services might help, but the fact that we have arrived at the point where we have to rely on antitrust enforcement to make Apple products less intrusive and user-hostile shows that the company has lost its way.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
Unfortunately, requirements that Apple provide a choice to install Spotify rather than Apple Music, or Kindle rather than Apple Books, on a new iPhone doesn't fix the problem.
A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.
I always pirate the media i buy and/or the physical books i buy.
Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can take… good notes on the pages).
Thankfully, on macOS, you can disable the store in the Music app entirely. This will probably be removed at some point. When disabled, the only remnant is a small username in the bottom-left corner of the screen. I would love to see this gone as well, but local libraries are increasingly of no concern to Apple or the general public so I doubt they will fix this.
Hell, I’d be happy if they stopped defaulting the search to Apple Music instead of local library.
That’s not even to begin talking about how having Apple Music subscription once fucks your iTunes library forever.
Enshitification is possible where there is some kind of lock-in and the pain of leaving is greater than the level of annoyance of the product. Apple has one of the strongest lock-in ecosystems and it's rational for them to do so.
I'm not sure there is a better way, because max freedom = open source, but that equals mostly subpar experience for the average user. Let's hope for more platforms and data transfer from one to the other.
I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26 they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music from iTunes Store.
(owned and operated by Apple, and __you__ paid for it.)
It didn’t have to be like this, but here we are.
I often go weeks without opening any app but the browser on my phone.
I do however need to use some apps sometimes unfortunately. My bank for example implemented some proprietary 2fa method that I need to use an app for (or i buy a special device to it which also seems inconvenient).
Anyway it’s the only phone i ever bought; only used 2hand ones before and I’ll probably won’t buy another
When I put it away, I always leave it there (or in an open book) and it always stays there (or in an open book).
At least on Mac, I have noticed the Apple TV app seems to stay on one of the Library tabs indefinitely if I leave it there, but maybe it has just escaped their notice.
On the other hand, there’s no separate tab for “Continue Watching.” (A partial work-around is using the widget.)
VLC is your friend.
Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.
Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software.
It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.
But to your point it has changed less than Windows or MacOS.
It will be better, in ways I can't predict. But almost every detail of the interaction will improve somehow. But probably no big changes on the more mature parts.
Oh, and it will have one infuriating thing that people keep doing wrong because everybody insists it's the right way. I'll lose some small functionality for disabling it.
That's how it has ever been.
That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.
The way I see it, this type of behaviour by Apple (or any other company doing this) is an invasion of mental real estate. When you force things in front of my eyes that I didn't ask to see, or in my ears, or whatever, that's occupying my brain cycles and space in ways that are entirely uninvited.
Of course, the EULAs and whatnot all require me to agree to this bullshit, so fine, it's technically invited when I opened the application and said "sure, try to sell me your stuff", but to me this isn't the spirit of the software or operating system at ALL, and has been a signal of worse things to come for some time now. It's essentially enshittification.
My answer has been to stop using it. After 25 years of using Apple's computers and around 12 years on their phones, I'm migrating off. No more iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, etc. I'm still on a mac and that'll be hard to change, but it's slowly happening. I spent the last week on the ocean and in the woods on a toughbook, and that was kind of fun. It was eye opening to take a computer where I'd never take a macbook.
I find this kind of behaviour totally deplorable anyway, and I can't tolerate it. It's insidious and damaging to their brand because ultimately it's harmful to their users. They want number to go up, I get it, but I'm not their fodder.
"Apple used to mean something" is a postmodern catechism to make you feel better when Apple reveals themselves as a federally-backdoored shoggoth.
The expectation that they won’t advertise them is, unfortunately, not a reasonable one.
You can turn off Apple Music the service entirely from the music app. If you stick to the library tab in books you’ll never see an ad. It’s really not anywhere close to the worst offender in the industry.
Is it a great thing? No.
I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.
nose boops Kagi
The books app itself is infuriating. It's more like a store with a list of purchases attached. Every single time I want to pull up my audiobooks, for instance, I hit the "audiobooks" button.... just to find the store instead. Every time I want to search through my library, I use the "search" box... just to find the store instead. Maddening.
The apple music app I actual really like, probably because it's not actually easy to purchase anything through it. The only major ask is that they stop limiting the number of recently added so I can actually find music I added
/s
More seriously: Apple, please never rework the compass, I don't need ads for Apple Compass+ when I'm hoping to figure out which was is north.
> Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store
As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms. Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial.
My frustration with Apple when I tried it out was that you either use iTunes or there's little other choice. Technically some choice, yes, but because most people are passive and use the Apple stuff by default, there's a smaller community of developers who are motivated to try to compete.
When I see people criticize Notepad in Windows (for example) it feels irrelevant because you're not expected to use Notepad for anything but the most trivial use cases. There are so many other, better options, and the platform has a culture of exploring those options.
Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)
They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn sucked all the air out of the room.
They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!
Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)
Home servers
Media streaming
Smartphones
Touchscreens
Tablets
They even had media production with MSNBC.
All of this was available from Microsoft in the XP era. How did they fail at literally all of it? There has to be a lesson.
(I was there first hand to witness it again and again!)
Bill Gates is terrifyingly smart. He sees trends decades ahead. But knowing something is coming (smart TVs) does you no good without timing.
You build a first gen product, accrue mountains of legacy tech debt in the process (being first is hard! There is no one else to learn lessons from!) and then a competitor comes along and makes a V2 when the market is more ready and they can implement it better than you because they can learn from everything you did wrong (possibly also hiring half your team away).
Timing is equally important as product. Making a smart TV before widespread broadband adoption? Before streaming video had a flood of high quality content? Oops.
Real Player was doing streaming video in the 90s! Everyone knew it was the future, it was obviously the future! The future is now and the majority of video is streaming from a server somewhere!
Great idea, but ouch that timing. (That said, founders got rich anyway, and real video was a necessary step to where we are now!)
Let it be someone else. Maybe spinoff promising new ideas where you can't follow others. If you can find ideas to be second on, look at old product annpuncements from companies that tend to be too early and shut down products that don't have engagement. Microsoft and Yahoo are good ones.
Or, do the new idea, patent the hell out of it, let it die, and when the idea comes around again, get some licensing revenue.
The problem with Microsoft being a first mover is they're too big. A small line of business is a problem for most big companies. It acrues too little customer oriented development to grow, because the numbers don't justify investment; but it acrues all the corporate cruft development and the product becomes hard to pivot under the weight of three rebrands.
Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets. Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience waiting for AR/VR.0
There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but way too early.
Are the corporate structures and cultures necessary for this just that different?
Also VCs have to invest their funds in something! :D
The key is matching innovation with timing. History is filled with great ideas done decades, or even a century, too early.
because their products are universally shit
see: Teams
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.
I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android. All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB) organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android tablet, phone and a generic cloud backup folder with SyncThing. I don't subscribe to any media service (and never have).
My music library/player is PowerAmp, my ebook reader is the open source KOReader and my podcast app is Podcast Addict. None of them has a store and they are all free (although I did upgrade to the plus version of PowerAmp to support the developer). They all get regular updates, are highly customizable and have every feature I want or can imagine wanting. My browser is Android Firefox with uBlock Origin so I don't see any ads and for YouTube I side-loaded Revanced Extended from the open F-Droid store, which is a clone of the YouTube app with no ads and all dark patterns removed. I also run a side-loaded open-source DNS-level ad blocker for the occasional social media app.
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 that still works great (I did replace the original battery last year which took ~20 mins). I'm using a five year old phone not because I'm cost conscious, I'd happily pay >$1,500 for a new phone and I keep looking at new models every year but never see anything that would be a noticeable improvement for my usage. Really... I swear I'm NOT trying to be @SimpleLife or minimalist/retro, I have a significant yearly budget for discretionary toys, but some years I struggle to spend it all because I'm also allergic to things that are constantly low-grade annoying or that I can't customize to my prefs. I just refuse to adopt anything that wants to own me instead of me owning it.
But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g., Spotify).
That said, though, at least we have this option. But is there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is available to them as well.
The discovery algorithm works based on fundamental metadata, additional data pulled from Last.fm (e.g., "related artists" and "popular tracks"), as well as its own acoustic matching algorithm.
This arrangement obviates the SD card, and also any other external syncing (PlexAmp plays live from the server, or has its own scheme for downloading to a local cache).
Yes, it still has a billion things wrong with it, including not being able to uninstall the shovelware, and not being able to modify the OS, and I'd rather have a third choice better than both these two.
The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26 since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own library.
The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
Spotify has other issues, but at least as a streaming player, it is smart enough to tell me when there is something playing somewhere else and it even allows me to keep playing while just switching the output.
If at least they had kept it as a good app to manage local music, but even that has regressed. Don't get me started on suboptimal use of space.
I have a hard time following the Apple advocates, it has become quite bad for the price you pay, there is really no other conclusion that is reasonable.
I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...
Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.
I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.
Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc
If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained.
I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff.
Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products.
yeah, but that ship has sailed.
That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.
The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.
So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.
And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.
This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.
If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back problems".
A small exaggeration? Not by far, reviewers nasty about device thickness.
Then 70% of people shove a case on and it really doesn't matter.
There are good water ingress reasons for non-replaceable batteries, making a device water proof and have a replaceable battery does add a good deal of thickness.
Anyway, you can get a battery replaced at a phone shop for a reasonable rate anyway, so IMHO it isn't as big of a deal now days.
Worse still, if you’re too polite, many people won’t “get” the message.
“Oh, he just thinks my baby has interesting and unique features.”
I agree in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum, we're talking about Steve Jobs. A dude who would semi-regularly send coworkers and subordinates out of rooms in tears, throw shit around the office, and in general make a complete ass of himself.
Like, I agree with you, it's gonna be hard to tell someone their baby is ugly. There's a better way to do it than throwing a stapler at the wall above their head and calling them ugly too.
I don't mean to pick on you in particular but we seriously need to shred this societal idea that visionaries, rockstar devs, auteurs, whatever, have to be anti-social fucking monsters to make whatever they happen to make. It's stupid and it sucks and it excuses tons of abusive behavior. I'm all for making great shit but if you have to hurt people to do it, then I don't think it's worth it at all.
So anyways, going into a design review I (UI dev lead) had warned early on that the new design was bad. I said it was going to be bad. Listed why it was going to be bad, and politely gave my feedback to UX, and I was ignored.
Walk into the review, it gets torn apart. It was really horrible. The GM looks over at me, asks for my take. I reply that I gave my feedback weeks ago and I hadn't approved of the design.
GM proceeds to lay into the UX team, swearing, yelling, and such, and basically asking why they hadn't listed to my initial feedback. It ended with an ultimatum that henceforth the design team was going to listen to me if I said no to a design before they wasted his time.
We were at the time outsourcing UX work to an obscenely expensive design firm who hasn't done software work before, just physical media. Some of the team was good, but a few of the designers were violently incompetent.
(A short time later we nixed the entire team, hired the good ones, and built our own,amazing, internal UX team.)
I'm not sure how I feel about the situation. It was nice to be vindicated, and rockstar personalities rarely listen to polite level feedback. "Fuck you don't bring me shitty designs and bill me tens of thousands of dollars for them when the fucking dev team can tell the design is shit" is kind of a legit response to people who just won't listen.
It does sour relationships though, and IMHO some of that relationship between me and the UX lead took years to rebuild.
Those getting married to the jock never said they just want a sensitive guy. Some value big muscles more than others, but certainly not the majority.
Is this supposed to be a positive point? Gates has exploited numerous legal maneuvers to create yes, a gigantic software company, and one of the absolute largest blights on tech as an industry. Name a Microsoft product that doesn't suck ass. Elon Musk hasn't done a fucking thing, he got lucky with PayPal, bought and booted the founders of Tesla, and has been coasting on it ever since. And since he fired his PR team his public image has gone to shit and all of his companies, save Space X and only because of generous Government contracts, are going down the drain.
> Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.
No, being an asshole is what one can get away with once one has struck it rich in tech. For all the shit talking I would do about Jobs, and do it I will, he is the only one on this list who did it in the direction you're talking about, where he was the asshole first, who THEN built a ridiculously successful business. Gates was a nepo baby who got access to computers at an incredibly young age when that was borderline unheard of. Musk would've never left his mothers basement if not for his father's wealth.
> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.
Ah, you're also in your mother's basement I see.
> There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply
We haven't been meaningfully part of evolution, survival of the fittest, since the first of our ancestors picked up a rock and tied it to a stick, and leapt to the top of the foodchain. We are by virtue of social networking and tool usage, apex predators. Nothing has been a threat to us in the "nature" way for thousands of years and nobody thinks otherwise apart from weird alpha-male guys who follow incredibly shit nature "science" to justify their unhinged anti-social behavior.
His biggest regrets before dying is how he treated his own family when looking back - again a textbook of what I write above.
Some people have immediate kneejerk reaction to the part with "sociopath" but I don't look at it as some sort of insult, rather just description of certain quality or lack of it of given person. No need to dance around the fact with many words, it is (was) what it is. If he knew better he would do it, nothing one can choose easily. And there would be some negative impact on his professional life, no doubt (some positive too but if you look at ultra rich guys not only in tech, they are +- the same stuff, it seems this is really prerequisite to rise meteorically, nice guys normally don't make it that far).
musk is similar albeit another unique mix of above. Bezos too. And so on and on.
But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.
Every other manufacturer at the time had a paragraph and illustration in their manual telling people not to hold their phone in a certain manner.
I think much of his bad attitude came from this fact that he felt Apple was unfailingly singled out.
If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they will).
His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.
Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.
The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
Frankly I think Jobs saw Cook as a key operator to ensure the firms future survival and future growth; I'd imagine Jobs foresaw the tremendous impact the smartphone would have and all Cook had to do was be a shrewd operator as Apple had built such a huge advantage over competitors by the time he was dead.
Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product.
It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.
If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.
This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.
Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.
That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.
That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.
Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases.
(But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)
While back in the 90s the brand/reputational damage might have destroyed them.
Jobs, with Mac OS X and the iMac, absolutely created the unassailable perception of quality and user experience Apple is known for today. The term "reality distortion field" was used a lot in relation to how much Jobs sold Apple and the Mac in keynotes.
So it's completely fair to use his well-known positions against the company's current practices.
> well-known positions against the company's current practices
Companies generally don't really have values besides maximizing profits. People working or leading them might. But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at most.
Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable.
Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.
Necessary, beneficial, has more upside than downside, whatever way you want to slice it.
> Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares
I feel like this is actually support for my argument that people change over time (either naturally, or to adapt to the times themselves changing): I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.
Agree, but personally I don't respect Cook and agree he seems to have sold his spine sometime around when he sold his soul. I got the sense that Jobs wasn't drifting toward increased greed but rather, a knowledge that he and Apple both had more than enough "F-you money" -- to do what they thought was best for the product, knowing that that was also exactly aligned with the long-term interests of the company anyway.
- I search for "restaurants" and someone is having a special
- A trampoline park opens near me, I'd like it to catch my eye
- I've been googling chocolates recently, so populate the map with chocolate shops
- Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway
I'm glad there are always ads available to stop my mind from wandering.
there are such better ways to enable these experiences without introducing the zero-sum, scam-inducing, corporate fuckery game that making it a pay-to-win ad-driven experience gives you
I’m also concerned that boredom makes you want to see ads
- just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.
- make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.
As for services they could go other way:
- be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or charge end user more with subscription.
- make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
[0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/metrics/revenue-by-seg...
Genuine question: is there a comparable Windows machine in a mini desktop form factor at a similar or lower price?
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/apples-fiscal-2025-in-cha...
And even a little bit of analysis will show none of your ideas will grow the bottom line.
For the iPad, how have the convertible Windows Surfaces been doing?
You really don’t see a problem with creating a “token router”? He also wants to create a distributed CDN where every computer is a node - ignoring the fact that most people have asymmetric internet access with low upload speeds and the entire value proposition of a CDN is that there are colocated servers at ISPs. Bit torrent (basically what he is proposing) is not exactly fast.
I own a Windows Surface. I personally find it very convenient, although I'll concede this point if you say the economics aren't working out.
I don't see the problem with creating a token router. Openrouter exists and seems to be doing fine. I'd love if you could actually elaborate on your concerns.
I agree that the CDN idea is pretty weak, but you could make it a bit better by rewarding users based on uptime. Rather than basing the rewards on total time opted in, base it off of total successful requests.
A CDN’s entire purpose for existing is high bandwidth colocated in ISPs data center.
Microsoft Surface sales peaked at $6.7 billion in 2022.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/26/microsoft-surface-is-nearly-...
With a 3% market share and it’s been declining since.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/30/24209519/microsoft-q4-202...
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/09/teen-iphone-ownership-c...
just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.
By adding macOS to it, I can't get it for my parents anymore because it's way too complicated for them. That's bad for business for Apple since the iPad is designed to be a bigger iPhone.
But wait.. what if you can choose iPad/macOS mode? Ehh... so what should iPad hardware/software engineers optimize for? They're totally different use cases. The market for people wanting to run a hybrid iPad is likely much smaller than you think. Tech communities on the internet is loud but I'm going to guess that 95% of iPad users do not care/want macOS on it.
make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.
make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.
Explain like I'm five, how does a multi trillion dollar company expect to keep growing revenue forever? Are they planning to keep enshittifying user experience until revenue dives?
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
After that saturate they can keep innovating like xiaomi - they build plenty of useful home products so apple can as well.
> It’s WWDC week. Every time this rolls around, I see people saying the same sort of thing. “Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done this”.
> Firstly, Jobs wasn’t perfect. He got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. His opinion wasn’t the end of the argument when he was alive, and it’s certainly not now that he’s been dead 14 years.
> But more importantly: Stop putting your opinion in a dead man’s mouth to give it more credibility. It’s ghoulish. Let your opinion stand on its own two feet.
The only question here is if using that image is tasteful or not.
Also, suggesting that Jobs did not have these red lines is not making the situation any better.
It doesn’t matter if they actually cheated at sports or if the image is real. The threat of it being untrustworthy is actively eroding trust.
It's impossible to determine with 100% confidence whether or not an image/video was AI generated. If the AI-generated image of Steve Jobs had been copied a bunch on the web, a reverse image search would have turned up lots of sources. Watermarks are imperfect and can be removed. There will always be ambiguity.
So either you're underzealous and if there's ambiguity, you err on the side of treating potentially AI-generated images as real. So now you only catch some deepfakes. This is extra bad because by cracking down on AI-generated content, you condition people to believe any image they see. "If it was AI generated, they would have taken it down by now. It must be real".
The alternative is being overzealous and erring on the side of treating potentially genuine images as AI-generated. Now if a journalist takes a photo of a politician doing something scandalous, the politician can just claim it was AI-generated and have it taken down.
It's a no-win situation. I don't believe that the answer is regulation. It'd be great if we could put the genie back in the bottle, but lots of gen-AI tools are local and open-source, so they will always exist and there's nothing to do be done about it. The best thing is to just treat images and videos with a healthy amount of skepticism.
That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager, everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, there are major CTAs that are essentially "black on black" and practically not visible below 50% screen brightness and not acceptably visible at max brightness. Just last night I noticed the browser tabs will render full color content behind the text. It's so bad I've been considering cataloging screenshots and writing about it, because some of it's laughably bad.
The iPhone 5 was revealed a year after Jobs stepped down as CEO and his death shortly after. The design was almost surely locked in while he was still CEO.
The original iPhone had a 2-toned back too.
Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.
In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!
But there's a matter of taste as well as novelty. And while there were many incredible things about Metro, history bears witness to how much Zune and Windows Phone and Windows 8 have become beloved household names in the decade-and-a-half since.
I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.
Agree. Jobs took big swings like Liquid Glass but, perhaps the most important part that’s missing in present Apple, he was obsessive about ensuring the swings were executed to a high standard. He was hands on in this pursuit.
It’s actually weird to me that a company so large, so well compensated, so profitable, so prolific, etc can’t seem to care enough about the details without a Jobs-esque foot on their neck type leader to be afraid of.
MobileMe’s devs were brought into an auditorium for a dressing down that included the lines “you should all hate each other for letting each other down” and in response to “what is MobileMe supposed to do” got a “Why the fuck doesn’t it do that”
The smug dopes that are left over in the design department are probably clapping each other in the back over shipping liquid glass. Tim doesn’t give a shit about how ugly, troublesome, and problematic it is. Stock price go up, whatever!
There's merit in having a principled hardass, but most people end up glossing over the "principled" part to dissect the merits of hardass management.
No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself - it was actually very good in that department, arguably still the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the devices ended up being very limited overall because there were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).
That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen icons didn't look so ugly with black background.
(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)
Until now I blamed Google, but now it seems much more likely that it was Apple’s fault.
Most are still there as Apple has one of the most stable employment places, ever. I know a lot of old senior Apple folks who all come back to Apple to retire as the benefits are good, pay is ok, and it’s beyond stable.
To this end, including the way Apple operates, it’s low noise and low friction to just coast and let the leadership team duke it out over revenue streams.
The company he built is now an order of magnitude more valuable and hardware is the best it’s ever been.
It’s maturing. No company stays nimble and vibrant and agile forever. It’s paying a dividend for Pete’s sake.
All these callbacks to oh no apple under Steve never would have done this … yeah well it’s 2025 and he unfortunately got cancer and died from it. Apple as a company lives on and new leadership should be free to take it in any direction they seem justified.
The situation is different, the world is different, apple is serving much more consumers, the company has much more employees, more products, more markets.
And i get it, the software they put out nowadays is pretty terrible and could be much better and everyone is frustrated but this constant steve ressurrection needs to stop.
Oxymoron?
The same approach that’s Mitchell suggests with Ghostty
Having acknowledged that, Apple shifted to the value extraction phase of its business lifecycle.
It sucks.
It like when your favorite band starts selling out, but as publicly traded company, I am not sure it is avoidable.
It’s “Ive” and Federighi wasn’t a candidate in 2011.
Also, how you think someone is going to work out and how they actually work out is still worth commenting on. Not every CEO would have extracted value in the same way. You can prioritize extracting value by making customers super happy so they buy more. That’s what the article is about.
Their hardware is still amazing, but I’ve had enough issues with software quality and Cook’s penny pinching philosophy that I’ve bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux.
So far, the experience is making me question whether my next main driver will be a MacBook.
I already have a ThinkPad X series running Linux as a secondary machine, so I can see what that side of the fence is like and it’s going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple’s part or a massive improvement on the x86 laptop industry’s part of switching to be possibility.
So far I get enough unplugged gas for a worrylesss morning/evening session, with lid movement causing instant sleep/wake and night battery drain of ~6%. Fans stay silent 90% of time, there is sometimes a weird sound on usage like a hdd read but it’s very subtle.
As a plus beyond the software, I get a touchscreen 4k display, larger storage, and disks/battery that can be replaced if it shits the bed. Considering that the device cost me less than one third of the price it’s not a bad deal at all.
Important to say, I tried 5 distros and only Ubuntu managed this. Fedora put fans on full blast, couldn’t wake from lid down and refused to talk to my external monitor, arch had weird scaling issues and popos desktop was working weirdly.
That is one of the offputting aspects of the experience, in my opinion. Some machines work better out of the box with Ubuntu (or derivatives), some work better with Fedora, some with Arch, etc. Of course it's possible to isolate what the distro that works best for a machine is doing that makes it that way so it can be applied to your preferred distro, but frankly who has the time for that?
For the moment I'm trying to avoid an all-or-nothing approach, if I can get to a workflow I enjoy in such a cheap device it's already a great success. It means that I don't have to say yes to apple no matter the deal, and I'm having a daily 'outgarden' experience so that when the time comes that apple's no longer the best option, I'll notice it naturally.
I'd have loved to see the asahi team achieving full support of at least one device, but it doesn't seem to be on the table for the near future.
How hot does the water have to be before the frogs admit it's boiling? I feel like everyone forgot the macOS OCSP outage where your desktop apps wouldn't launch because of broken DRM. Or Ron Wyden's Push Notification whistleblowing. Or that gold statue Tim Cook gave out a few months ago - were those not real mistakes, yet?
I'm not opposed to a good Linux ARM laptop. I just can't tolerate Asahi-level driver support, nor can I live with macOS while running my workflow in UTM. The main thing stopping me from dailying Apple Silicon is Apple's complete neglect of macOS as a computing platform. macOS isn't just "bad like Windows" anymore, it's not even certain if Apple will support it in 10 years.
It's on its way, but it's not there yet. The extent to which other laptop manufacturers have been dropping the ball on building laptops that are excellent at being laptops cannot be understated, and that's without holding them to the standard that Apple has achieved where their laptops accomplish that while also blurring the lines between laptop and desktop in terms of power. Add in issues relating to build quality, Linux compatibility, etc and you're left with a tiny handful of machines that still aren't true peers to their counterpart MacBooks. Frankly, it's absurd.
Even formerly good manufacturers have been goofing around, like Lenovo's attempt to frog-boil its ThinkPad buyers until they're convinced that features like trackpoints and quality keyboards can be excluded or Dell faceplanting into the exact same follies that Apple did with the Touch Bar MacBooks.
Related to your second paragraph, I have a 2017 MBP that just end-of-lifed so we're gonna try Linux on that.
And the M line is fast. A pretty good computer for the money. That said, I hear getting Linux running on those platforms is troublesome and may be a path that Apple is actively fighting against. And if I can't install Linux, that makes the computer premature landfill fodder which pisses me off.
I love the Framework concept, but you'll pay for the privilege. Not sure what's next for me.
It’s the product ladder with artificial limitations like low fps screens or small storage to push you a bit more.
It’s bugs piling up because Marketing needs the next buzzword released.
It’s the aesthetics optimized for a screenshot rather than real usability.
It’s the feeling that their top talent is not able to deliver anymore, like their camera’s processing or AI features.
This one really pisses me off as someone who just had to upgrade their 2018 iPad Pro. The air would've been great, if it had a 120hz screen. I really don't need any other "pro" feature but I refused to tolerate 60hz in 2025 when every other device I own including my big desktop monitor is 120hz or more. But no, I have to spend an extra $500 for a higher refresh rate. I didn't even want the pro, I want a 120hz air so I can get the colors I want.
Nonetheless, because my screen was broken and I needed a new iPad, I forked over the money for the pro. Conveniently, they use two different magic keyboards so now that I'm "locked in" to the pro ecosystem, I'm forever stuck buying iPad pros unless I also want to have to buy a new magic keyboard that works with the Air line if they ever release a 120hz air.
Apple can easily differentiate the air from the pro in numerous other ways besides refresh rate, and yet they still continue to ship 60hz screens.
I didn't really notice this until I setup an iPhone from scratch for someone. I normally just move from one to the other. The nagging from Settings is outrageous. It will never stop telling you to setup Apple Pay and Siri and offering Apple Care. It was like the experience of buying a PC in the 2000's.
Why would they care if they can just lock the gates and put some barbed wire on top of the walls? What are you going to do, move to Android?
Why not? If ads are coming anyway why pay the apple tax.
Of course Jobs blocked this, but it's insane that it was even proposed as a serious idea. I'm pretty sure this would have been a PR stain on Apple even in the pre-social media era.
If it’s market pressure, it tells me that Cook doesn’t really believe their future roadmap is good enough for growth, so he needs to hedge with other things that make the product worse. Of course those very things will hurt future growth. That’s how an upward spiral turns downward.
If someone hands me a golden goose I’m not going to enter it in a cock fight. I’d be wise to continue with the golden egg strategy.
Following Jobs was not an easy task, and Apple had done better than most probably expected in a post-Jobs world. It feels like Cook is getting dangerously close to throwing it all away.
The sentiment of this article seems to be praising Jobs as a protector of user experience. And the author doesn't have the decency to use his real face?
Yes. The point of willingly putting yourself in the walled garden was that the experience was definitively better than the other options.
When the walled garden ceases to be better and starts adopting all the same dark patterns and user hostile experience as everyone else, what point is there in staying inside?
> and I think for many Apple customers
Unfortunately, I think people who care about this enough to leave are a rounding error. It’s why the entire consumer product market looks the way it does.
It popped up a second time as I SLOWED DOWN at a red light. I didn't even come to a complete stop but apparently that was "stopped" enough for it to pop up.
Not to mention while you're using Google Maps the whole time it's popping up asking "Is that cop still there? Is there still construction?" and they're looking for you to click on a button on the car's screen that indicates yes/no. However, when I'm parked at a rest area trying to look for the nearest cracker barrel it'll start navigating me automatically to one that's 45min in the wrong direction instead of just letting me pick which one I want to go to.
And now, ads will show in Apple Maps? Ah yeah, when I'm driving is definitely the best time to distract me for your own greed!
It's asinine. Obviously the "Safety features" are just performative. Probably so they can force us to have a mic enabled or something. It's bs.
All other issues I've outlined is a symptom of that fundamental issue. Apple is losing its soul.
The author suggests Steve would have done something based on what Steve did in the past in that particular set of circumstances. But it's not fair to suggest what Steve would have done today, given where Apple is now. Would Steve have said "screw it" to the share price and just ran the company with the same ethos? Maybe, he was bold like that. But then he also had a Board to answer to.
If you sell people things they want and you treat them well they keep buying from you instead of tolerating you until they stop buying from you.
Capitalism is so fucked
If they went public, no amount of profit would be enough. They would have to squeeze every last cent out of their users for the quarterly reports.
Because Steve is not around to rip these MBA-types a new asshole for even mentioning such crap.
Tim is not a visionary leader. He is a great manager who can manage logistics like nobody else and deliver the finished product.
But Steve was the visionary leader: he laid out the plan of where they were going, sold his troops on the big picture and Tim helped get the troops there.
If it is AI wtf is it even doing there though? It adds nothing. A quick search returns a bunch of images where Jobs looks annoyed or trying to stop something.
Yes, it is a well-known truth that CX drives product success, and if you want to credit Jobs for that, fine.
But referencing back to the 90s because Jobs talked to you directly 25 years ago truly dilutes the message. It is really weird, honestly, to claim that a business strategy from decades ago when Apple was in a completely different reality is some sacrosanct policy that shall never be questioned.
I'm not saying the policy is wrong - I agree with it. So do most product managers I know. But all organizations change over time. Society changes. Tech changes. A viewpoint wherein you have "red lines" that cannot be challenged is short-sighted.
It's rather disingenuous to claim, in context, that society has changed to enjoy advertisements. Indeed, I would make the argument that society will never, ever, get to the place where we enjoy advertising.
Advertising is like the value-added tax: horrific for everybody involved, and society would have killed it a long time ago for that reason, if it wasn't for how much money it makes.
Ads can be done right too, and have been done right plenty of times. If you want to nitpick the GP, do not create such a glass ceiling.
Citation very much needed on your part.
And if you pair it with a capital movement tax, you can make it proportional. But we don't have anything equivalently good for capital movement, so most governments refrain from it.
Either way, if you want to argue that VATs are bad because they only tax one part of economical activity, that's an incredibly bad argument.
He makes IBM look cool in conparison.
Jobs saw something with iAd.
The problem is simple auction mechanics favor whoever has the deepest pockets. A mediocre chain with fat margins outbids an amazing local place, even if the local spot delivers way more value. You’re optimizing for who can pay, not who’s actually good.
To fix this, you weight bids by quality signals like ratings, time spent and repeat visits.
Now ads amplify what’s already great instead of just selling visibility.
Users get better recommendations, good businesses win, and Apple builds trust. That’s how you turn ads from a tax on attention into actual product value—and an improved user experience.
Consider the failure modes of pure algorithmic ranking:
Cold start problem: A phenomenal new restaurant opens. It has no ratings, no historical visit data, no repeat customer signals. Your algorithm buries it. How does it escape this trap? Organic discovery is glacial—it might take months to accumulate enough signals while the business burns cash.
Structural bias: Your algorithm might systematically underweight certain business types. Maybe sit-down restaurants generate longer “time spent” signals than excellent quick-service spots. Maybe your visit detection misses certain building types. The algorithm doesn’t know it’s biased.
Local knowledge asymmetry: The business owner knows their value proposition intimately—they know their recent quality improvements, their new chef, their differentiation. The algorithm is looking backwards at historical data.
Network effects lock-in: Once a place is highly ranked, it gets more visits, more ratings, reinforcing its position. Even if quality declines, the algorithm is slow to react.
Quality-weighted ads let businesses with superior local information challenge the algorithmic ranking. If you’re genuinely better than your algorithmic position suggests, you can bid to prove it. The quality weighting means you only profit if you’re right about your own quality—it’s costly signaling backed by conversion economics. This is “outside-in” because you’re not trying to perfect a centralized algorithm. You’re creating a market mechanism where distributed information surfaces through economic incentives. The businesses that are most undervalued by the algorithm have the strongest incentive to correct it.
Pure algorithmic ranking is central planning. Quality-weighted ads are a market.
Another subtle but distinct user experience cost of this would be that every user is given the option to choose between one option or the other, and that is already part of the user experience, and it has a cost.
It's similar to the idea that more options are not better, you can't just keep adding more settings and levers and pulleys knobs on the task bar and the settings and the profile and the customization tab and the control panel, and the privacy center, etc...
Each choice has a UX cost. Even if it's technically outside of the software and it occurs at the shop. The product line is the first part of the experience, will you choose a product? a product XL? A product XL Pro?
It’s obvious that many of google services have huge negative impacts on my privacy, which is why I buy from apple.
Hardly surprising given how they reneged their stance on in-OS advertising though.
Steve also underpaid developers - see the court proceedings here.
I am not saying Steve was not creative and effective, mind you. He was that. But he also had a criminal side, and I hate this whitewashing of praising Steve without pointing at the criminal side at the same time. See reports such as this one here:
https://www.thedrum.com/news/steve-jobs-named-top-conspirato...
The media is often not critical of the superrich, even more so when it is owned by them, which is why unaffiliated media must be a LOT more critical in general. The whole article here babbles about how great Steve Jobs is and how bad Tim Cook is. I'd rather like to think that both are or were humans with failure points.
Or maybe I'm out of touch ? I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
But to me, i buy apple because this a premium device that is well thought out and doesn't make me waste time on advertisement, dark pattern and other bullshit i don't have the time nor the will to care about.
I ditched windows for macos after the candy crush saga in start menu and just the overall philosophy of windows 10. For instance, not being able to decide if I want to update and when.
I ditched Android because Google made me loose so much time with their ad riddled services, and their app professionalism is abysmal. It constantly change, no user interface is the same,...
For all these reasons I bought expensive apple devices and I tolerated the many bugs, often having to restart my iphone once every day.
Now if you're going to monetize me just as the other and make me waste my time fiddling around on apple maps checking if one thing is an ad or something I actually want to see, I'll just buy the cheapest thing I can get.
There is no reason to pay premium for the same quality.
But that's just me, maybe they know something I don't. Brand fidelity, especially in the USA is strong, people don't want to be that guy who has an Android ? iPhone are status symbols in China ?
"brutally" is the only factual part, otherwise he harmed the experience plenty, often for the sake of appearances
Goggle also had a memo on how ads were bad and rejected the idea ... until they didn't, with the same founders, so you don't need much of a leadership change for the strong incentive of ad money to dilute the resolve.
> One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. [...]
This sounds so weird in 2025. However, I can see that probably in those times there was no "norm", and people were trying different things.
Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup might be the norm. And who knows how many similar things we dodged because of people like Jobs.
These days, we have moved to far more insane schemes. E.g. smart TV manufacturers are patenting detection of static frames to show you ads while TV is idle (although I don't think anyone has actually shipped that yet).
Wow, this is wild. I've also remembered that Viber puts ads among your chats in a chats list. It shocked me first time I've seen that.
> patenting
As I understand, big companies are making lots of patents, and most of those never come to life.
https://www.wired.com/story/roku-tests-showing-video-ads-bef...
Are there video ads at startup on Windows? On Android?
> ... I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily similar “opportunity.” ... 1999-ish ... Lee Clow and I were invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac system software. ...
Not that I like ads, but - Late 90's Apple, fresh out of a near-death experience, is an extremely different context from today's Apple, with it's 12-digit annual profits and #4 spot on the Fortune 500 list.
I honestly don't know this is just a question.
> ... wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a high Fortune 500 listing potentially be enough to make Steve say "We have enough honestly" ...
It'd be nice to imagine. But given Steve's documented horrible behaviors at a number of points in his life...I sadly doubt it.
Smartphones are a bit harder, but it's still possible to flash a Google-free ROM onto many Android phones. If push comes to shove, I could also see myself dailying a PostmarketOS-style handheld for basic SMS, auth and music player capabilities.
Edit: deleted a couple of company references that weren’t needed to make my point.
I feel the story being told would be more equivalent to what Microsoft is doing rather than Google.
That said, advertising is like a virus, and every company and product is eventually infected by it. It's too tempting to not monetize your customer's eyeballs once you have enough of them.
I doubt we'll see a pseudo macOS mode on mobileOS, but the mirroring for iOS in the last 2 major releases of macOS is just a jump to the left of local emulation.
Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments. Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment.
Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to expect it for free, with basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it. I suspect that most users think that ads are a better user experience than not using it at all because they won't pay $9.99/month for maps.
Maps is also a search engine, and ads are the primary way to fund search engines. I guarantee that if Apple every launches iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
> iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.
See, I disagree with your entire premise here. Apple, unlike Google, has a very very profitable hardware business which provides so much to the bottom line that they don't have to operate Apple Maps or Apple Search or Calculator as a self-sustaining business with its own P&L. It's stupid to operate as though they must.
The correct thinking (in my not so humble opinion) for a long-term-minded company is to recognize:
1. That massive firehose of money allows them to make Maps markedly better than what Google can afford to do. Since Apple gave up on UI/UX design excellence, this ability to not rely on ads is arguably their only remaining differentiated advantage.
2. Part of what allows Apple to command such monster-sized margins is that (usually... so far... outside of the App Stores at least) their product is not packed full of sleazy ads that significantly detract from the experience. You don't just get to fully enshittify the product and still command the same high prices as you did when you were offering a premium product. A Porsche covered in wraps advertising porn sites and penis pills, which plays loud AI-generated ads on every screen all day long would not sell at the price a normal one does.
"Challenge accepted" - Tim Apple.
The App Store ads are one thing, it is a store after all, but adding ads to a core OS functionality like Maps is clear degradation of service. When people spend 1 to 2 grand on a premium phone they don’t expect to see ads, ever.
I guess it's a melancholic reality that only certain outstanding individuals can be relied on to produce greatness. Most of us are just not there.
Another such example is Python. Python is slowly being bloated by the people in charge, since Guido basically gave up, soon to be as shitty as C++ is.
I am afraid Blender and Pytorch will be next, seeing how the original visionaries have left or will leave in the not so distant future.
Steve Jobs has been gone for a long time. Other people have taken his place, and Apple has been very successful since. While Jobs might have been very successful in his vision, a lot of things have changed since then, and it's very reasonable that the current apple execs might not align with what his philosophy was at the time.
Apple has a ruthless competitive upper echelon that gets rewarded on metrics that prioritize market hits and revenue increases. Get ready for more of this.
Obligatory I've been using Macs since the SE comment but I know Apple gives 2 damns about that.
And I hate them.
Yes. Steve would take a giant dump all over this nonsense.
Apple is increasingly at risk of similar enshittification as Google.
We need people willing to say "fuck you" to bullshit. Otherwise, the boards take over and focus on anything that brings them an extra few bucks.
Enshittification is real, and we need people willing to fight back against it.
I feel like most of this is Microsoft's fault. As MS lowers the bar for what's acceptable on Windows, Apple just has to be somewhat-obviously better.
Additionally, Google's ad-driven economy set a low bar with Android, but that platform has always been that way. Together, those platforms make it really easy for Apple to posture as being considerate.
Everyone here on HN likely agrees that he was right never to cross that red line.
The path from "great user experience" to "enshittified user experience" consists of crossing such red lines, one after the other, for short-term profit.
---
But he was also passionate about something that seems almost “old school”—the customer experience. Creating the best experience would lure new customers and build brand loyalty."
I find the opinions above very iffy. The only thing that is unquestionable to me was the design. Whether one likes it or not it is present and prominent.
But I think he was a guru of creating cult.
VC-brained morons are literally incapable of not ruining the companies and products they get their hands on. I've been a soft proponent of a global ban on ads for as long as I can remember, and I've only become more convinced over the years that it is something we need to agree on and start enforcing as a society.
Ads are evil, the whole incentive structure is fucked, the "free" products are brainrot trash. It is time to cut off the limb before the infection spreads.
its called the semi-strong form of the efficient markets hypothesis.
Sure, simplification means having to have some opinionated ways of doing things because you're removing options, but there's a very real benefit that can come out of it.
If anything, it makes the current state of Apple that much more sad.
I think, iPod was really one of the first users of 1.8" hard drives, so it was better than the competition simply because Apple had access to better hardware.
Apple did have clever, original, and good marketing, but the product (iPod) was so clearly better than anything that came before it, either way. And that was my original point against the prior comment that the customer experience was just "be like Steve Jobs" and then it's good.
I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on point. Its marketing was great, however.
I'm not saying the iPod was perfect, though later versions got pretty close. But the "no wireless" part of the review still makes me chuckle. There were few hand-held anything that leveraged it at any truly useful level until proper smartphones existed.
Contrasted to Microsoft's philosophy where no one is allowed to have a good experience, it's a breath of fresh air.
I'm a lifetime Mac user who has bought exactly one iPhone (the 3G S) before switching to Android. I'm definitely not in the Jobs reality distortion field.
But I do remember how the iPod was better than every similar thing at the time, and how people spent _years_ clamoring for Apple to harness that same focus to make a phone. Apple had to go out and buy the iPhone name because that's what it had been colloquially called for years before it was announced.
There are plenty of things Apple has done wrong, many by Steve personally, but you can't seriously claim that his taste was only applicable to him.
Don't denigrate the meaning of the word "abuse" to make your hot take spicier.
It was much, much better than an iPod. I had an iPod first. I gave it away, because it was too heavy to carry around.
The Zen Stone was essentially weightless and could be operated without looking at it. The only problem I ever had with it was that it couldn't charge and play at the same time.
> Whatever his reason, Tim Cook is not as protective of the user experience as his predecessor was. If we were to ask Tim why it’s okay to bring ads into Apple products now, but wasn’t okay during Steve’s reign, the best (only?) answer would probably be, “Today’s Apple is very different from Steve’s Apple.”
> Quite true. And that is exactly the problem.
So Ken Segall first admits he doesn't know the reason, then speculates the answer Tim Cook would give if they were asked the question, then ends the article by contemplating on that speculative answer.
And the thumbnail is quite obviously AI generated. Just low quality all around. The point could be driven home without resorting to either of these two things.