The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.
It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.
You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.
Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.
If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.
Just for starters, what if you have two people in the house who want to do a Fitness+ workout together? Too bad: even if they both pay for it, one gets the nice tracking and HUD and the other gets squat. This is an obvious and trivial feature, and it’s nowhere to be found. I could maybe see it getting cut for the launch checklist if people were behind schedule, but Fitness+ plus is more than five years old now, there is no excuse.
It’s total abandonware from a company trying to do the absolute minimum to get your recurring subscription.
They do support syncing up the workouts of people who're each using their own device: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101979
It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated. If it wasn't, you'd go buy a market alternative (Android, PC). In my mind, this means that they spent a lot of time and dev resources (i.e. money) on their Frameworks. I think it showed. Time was spent on design. They focused on opening up capabilities "the right way."
Now that's pointless. If the iPhone is just an Android phone with a different coat of paint, then dev resources are going to be shifted to a place where Apple can distinguish themselves in the market, where they have platforms that they can control: Services.
"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.
It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.
You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use").
People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not.
Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free.
People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.
In my mind, “user” stated to take over when we started having web based services that were used by people, but they were the ones paying. For example, Google and Facebook. Both got paid through ads, so they advertisers were the customers. The “users” were just the eyeballs the advertisers wanted to reach. So, you had to make your service compelling enough for someone to use for long enough that they’d see enough ads to make it profitable to provide the service.
It’s more akin to talking about “viewers” or “viewership” when talking about more traditional media.
For Apple, they are generally looking to get paid by the ultimate consumer of the product. So to them, we are the customers.
Maybe I'm just old, but we've called ... users ... 'user' since Unix or before. Perhaps it is just because Unix was integral to my early computing experience that I see it that way.
However, I’ve been subscribed to it since its inception because it is the best way to have games that my kid can play without shady ads or engagement practices.
I know that is not going to last, as my kid is now a pre-teen and likes other types of games (like Hollow Knight) that are not available on Apple Arcade.
But the current state of the gaming industry is terrible, especially on mobile. Indy companies producing games like Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, and Stray are good, and there is the extremely rare case of Larian. But other than that, the market is full of dark-UX patterns to promote app purchases. Mobile apps are a minefield of gacha games that should be forbidden for kids.
News+ is the only one of these that has poor quality.
Apple Music is extremely good, and pays artists better than many other platforms like Spotify. Unlike Spotify it isn’t enshittifying the product with AI music, video, and podcast distractions. The software is good quality, native code, not a web wrapper. Plus, there’s a classical music focused version that’s entirely separate.
Fitness+ is a premier product in the space. Have you tried it? The workouts sync with your watch and it has top tier video production quality along with a ton of thought put into accessibility.
Arcade probably does need to have more games added and more attention paid to it, but it’s basically the only place to get mobile games that aren’t stuffed full of gambling mechanics, pay to win, and advertisements.
Apple TV+ is literally the new HBO. They produce some of the most critically acclaimed shows on the planet, and broke the record for number of Emmy nominations by a single studio last year. The software is actually good, which is only really true for TV+ and Netflix. The production values, bitrate, and technology integration (Dolby Atmos/Vision etc) is second to none. MLS coverage by Apple is also top tier, again, with other sports networks regularly broadcasting mediocre quality (bad colors, muddy details, poor on-screen graphics). They’re also getting F1 for US viewers which is almost certainly going to be an improvement over the status quo.
The Play Store Pass? Which not only has games but utilities https://play.google.com/store/pass/getstarted
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat
The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow.
They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers.
I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.
This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.
In this specific example there is a very big difference between producing a format for use in a first-party app vs trying to replace standards for content used across the web.
They kept opening it more and more but by then it was too late.
Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.
I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint.
It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook.
SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after.
Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined.
It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely.
This hardly an original sentiment, but when Steve Jobs died. Jobs was not perfect, but he believed they were there to make great products, had good taste with obsessive attention to detail, and was pretty much omnipotent in the company. I'm sure there are people with many of these traits in Apple, but not all of them together.
Their first new hardware release was the Apple Watch, which is a confused product, with too many functions on launch, and a poorly thought out two button + scroll wheel + touch screen interface (I still don't really know which button does which). And don't get me started on that ridiculous solid gold version.
You can still see the old Apple in there (look at their hardware!), but it's fragmented and not all pulling in the same direction.
The watch was not only eventually a mega hit, it was an Ive/jobs idea.
Literally everything you are saying is wrong.
I realise that the watch was probably under development for years before Jobs died. It was, however, released in a half baked state – do you remember what the the original use of the lozenge shaped button was, for example? Things being "hits" is not what's under discussion here, Apple has sold a lot of stuff in the Cook era, no doubt about that. Microsoft has had a lot of hits too, doesn't make their products Old-Apple-like!
I don't know how good Ive is without Jobs. His post-Jobs efforts have been pretty mixed. I'd argue Apple's hardware has improved since he left (although, admittedly through playing it safe, especially with the Mac).
Do you think Apple is in decline when it comes to the quality of their products? Because if you don't we're just talking past each-other.
- Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products
- His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation.
He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it.
As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet.
Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days.
To be honest, I'm not sure if you can entirely blame Cook. Ever since the 2010s, it's felt like capitalism has reached an endstage culture, where it is no longer about an equilibrium between best product for lowest price vs minimum product for highest price, but instead just maximizing shareholder value at the cost of the customer, the workers, the business itself, the environment and what have you.
Since then it's been on a nonstop drive to jam as many subscriptions services into the iOS ecosystem as possible.
The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences.
People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.
After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.
Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.
There just wasn’t the demand.
Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.
And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.
Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.
They didn’t need to do like half the work they did, and a lot of what they did do in order to make the news feeds prettier are seldom adopted because Apple doesn’t want to do the hard partnership work to drive and support it.
Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".
My honest take on it is that it's the payment companies that are complacent here - they're just allowing payment processing for anyone now up to a certain amount before doing proper diligence. The fact these chinese vendors can spin up a website, get payment processing, verify an ads account and buy advertising shows that many compliance functions are being skipped (or are complicit) in this.
It works because everyone in the game has something to gain from it - Apple's contract likely puts verification on Taboola's plate, which is likely not being done per their own "controls" process, or is itself being automated (poorly). Taboola is getting paid because they're running these ads and charging for them, the vendors are being paid because they're drop shipping temu garbage that doesn't resemble their AI ads (since taboola isn't checking this at all) and getting away with it for a few months by long shipping times and delaying refunds/chargebacks long enough to get paid, and the payment processors (paypal, apple pay, google pay) are all making money on their obscene 1%+ processing markups, and have special "group" programs where a company can underwrite their own merchants provided they follow guidelines (compliance offloading). Visa/Mastercard are offloading their compliance duties to the payment processors until they get a formal complaint or chargeback/refund spike over a certain ratio (where they issue a fine and seize processing volume - which is also income for them).
btw if you want to be 100% sure something is a scam - check the iframe url on the credit card input form on the checkout page - on mustylevo.com its https://cashiers.myshopline.com/pci-sdk/v3/iframe.html?merch... which is hardly a name brand ecom platform - they have a "shopify-like" checkout but that isn't shopify (props to shopify/shop pay - they've been very quick to kill these kind of scams on their platform despite it losing them some fees).
So yeah - everyone involved in this is making money and is complicit through their lack of process.
It's reminiscent of triangulation fraud in that regard. The incentive is for everyone involved to keep their mouths shut because you buy something for below-market prices on sites like eBay, the "seller" places orders using stolen credit and debit cards with legitimate retailers, and the product ships directly to you. Everyone wins...as long as the account holder doesn't pay attention to their statements.
When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.
In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.
I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me
> http://google.com/ads/preferences
I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).
My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.
Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.
Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.
Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted.
The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions.
For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.
The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.
So be it.
It's like someone realizing that their crack dealer is an untrustworthy scumbag who is destroying everything the care about and they need to totally cut ties with him, and a friend objecting "Unfortunately, the 'scumbag' is your crack supplier himself."
Yeah, we know that. If starving the beast means we have to give up our unhealthy addictions, it's probably a side benefit rather than a counter argument.
I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively.
> no one actually wants to pay
Two things
1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this.
2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.
On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.
There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.
I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.
> Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing
This is an assumption not backed by data. But its pretty much impossible to truly test this hypothesis at any real scale. What data we do have is if many brands stop advertising when they used to do advertising, they tend to start to lose sales. But, as you point out, their competitors didn't necessarily reduce advertising as well, its not testing "what if everyone cut advertising".
> But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already?
Its an assumption these people would have even found the product in the first place, or were willing to give it a try, or even know the product category or type exists in the first place, and that this organic growth would have happened fast enough to keep the product alive. If everyone is basing their decisions off word of mouth, are there really going to be enough people in your network to buck the trend and give a scrappy new competitor a go and have their opinion make decent enough waves?
A world without any advertising at all seems to me to be a place where entrenched names in markets end up dominating based purely on people practically never finding the competitors. They become the default, the go to. This still largely happens in this over-marketed world today though, I do agree, but I think that's more of over-consolidation of producers and distributors having an outsized say on what we see in a lot of physical stores.
That world without any advertising also leads to some things not being made that would have otherwise existed, things that people generally like. Lots of magazines and other publications practically live off some amount of marketing, and they largely exist as a format for people to go see what's happening in a given industry. Lots of things like sports leagues/teams rely on sponsorships. Would there be Formula 1 racing if they didn't have those corporate sponsors?
I do agree especially internet advertising is largely destroying the internet. I don't understand how anyone uses mobile web pages without an ad blocker these days. Its absolutely terrible looking at anyone else's phones that doesn't block the ads, every page is more ad than content. We've definitely gone too far.
Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.
But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.
Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.
All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.
Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.
Because what matters is the total spend per resulting purchase, not spend per impression.
Because spam ad companies have a very tiny conversion rate, they can only pay a very small amount per impression before it becomes unprofitable.
Legitimate companies aren't usually trying to completely trick their customers. They are selling an actual halfway decent or good quality product. Therefore, if they are targeting well, they have a much much higher conversion rate and can therefore pay much more per impression.
Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
They have not been very successful in their goals. I suspect, without sarcasm, that that is because compared to the absolutely routine click-fraud conducted up and down the entire ad space at every level, those plugin's effects literally didn't even register. It's an arms race and people trying to use ad blockers to not just block the ads but corrupt them are coming armed with a pea shooter to an artillery fight, not because they are not very clever themselves but just without a lot of users they can't even get the needle to twitch.
Completely agree.
> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.
There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.
Trying to get a proper grasp of consensus on open forums is hopeless.
If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.
And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.
You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.
// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.
Maybe they would have done that anyway though.
Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all.
My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.
I don’t have a TV, don’t listen to the radio or read newspapers or magazines. I live in a small town with no metro, no billboards. I buy things I need like milk and vegetables, I don’t buy things that require ads for me to know about.
I Adblock the web aggressively.
Especially on this site I would be very careful with trusting any recommendations. Probably more often than not it's the product/service of the person talking about it, so basically an ad.
I remember back in 2010 I had to wait a week and correct my ad before it was approved and now they basically stream all kinds of scams without checking. They do have quite a few people, they could build a better scam detection system but it's against their interests.
I assume this comes down to some sort of distribution agreement, but, as bad as the ads are, this single behavior is the reason I stopped using Apple News and continue searching for a successor.
It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.
I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.
I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.
I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.
I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.
I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).
Do not buy this!! [1] https://kenmiso.com/products/%E2%9A%A1%E2%9C%A8ultimate-v8-e...
Not trying to make your situation worse, I just find it interesting what these sites are able to get away with to get people to part with their money.
https://img-va.myshopline.com/image/store/1731468034215/1dd4...
That mug is amusing but it should't be too hard for China to make something similar - but real (at least without the weird piston).
I open it semi-regularly with some naive hope that it won't be garbage.
What's more, if you even touch them while scrolling, it triggers the "download app" screen, even if I don't explicitly tap. This is new as of a few weeks ago.
But management by metrics means line go up? All is good.
> These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down.
Shouldn’t facilitating such scams be illegal? Cracking down on media companies like Apple who serve scams might be a bridge too far, but why not go after a scam aggregator like Taboola?
Try it: when it tells you a story isn’t available without a subscription, search the headline and often the story can be read on its original source, for free.
Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.
I would imagine it might be the same with those ads.
This "just-so" story gets repeated constantly in threads about scams, but I've never seen anyone put up any actual proof. The more likely explanation is that scammers are just bad at English since they're predominantly from poor third-world countries.
It could be sloppiness, but I think scammers just organically copied efforts that worked, and those were the ones with poor presentations because they pre-filter and so target the scammers efforts more efficiently. The scammers need not be aware of why it works.
It is intentional. People who will not notice, are the least likely to complain later.
Do you know why all these “Nigerian prince” emails are of a very specific style?
Or rather, if you believe you are too poor to afford a $10 a month subscription you probably believe you're too poor to afford anything that is advertised. The model of "premium subscription with no ads" flies in the face of reality.
Advertising is speech and it used to be that if a magazine/newspaper printed a scam ad, it was horribly damaging to their business, both legally and morally.
I think YouTube has no idea that when I see 70% ads for things that are transparently scams, the other 30% of advertisers are being scammed too because I'm going to assume that they are all scams. Meta has been busted for putting it in writing that they could do something about scam ads but won't because it would cost them revenue in the short term.
I guess that was at the same time the low point of marketing and also its most honest stage.
Since last year, I've been reporting every gambling ad as "Promoting illegal product/service" (they are, in fact, illegal here) to no avail, there's no end to these ads nor seems like YouTube is willing to do anything but implement dark patterns to discourage reporting, such as delayed pop-ups when reporting to interrupt typing.
I noticed some time ago that others ads that seemed not related to gambling were also leading to gambling apps. They are categorized as anything, like Hotels, Banking, Cullinary and Education. Don't look like YouTube checks if the things being advertised are really what they claim to be. It's worse when you remember that kids also use YouTube a lot.
It is an awful lot of power to give these companies to decide how we use their devices to interact with the world _and_ how we view the world.
I don't want anyone curating the current events or long-form I read. I want to see the whole buffet and choose myself, even sampling the unsavory ones from time-to-time to keep myself in check.
I clicked on the daring fireball link and immediately saw an intrusive ad.
They are just everywhere, the web was never like this in the beginning.
A complete scourge.
The online adverting industry is raking in billions on scamming people, while providing questionable value for actual good brands. Even if your company is honest and makes good products, you're competing with the scammers for ad space and that pushes up your cost.
I've said this on multiple occasions, but I do not believe that the honest companies are able to fund the tech industry in it's current form. Meta, Google, Apple and everyone else, expects increasing revenue, year on year, most of which is suppose to be delivered by ads, bought by other companies. Those companies just aren't see the same level of growth, nor do they see enough value from ads to increase their advertising. So the big websites take in more and more questionable ads to pad their numbers. So what if consumers get scammed? They should have been more critical.
As a longtime Mac nerd, this makes the ads story even worse than it already was. See this [0] (unrelated to me) article on the ways that Cook's focus on the stock has caused rot for a good summation of how software / services are tanking at Apple.
All plugged-in Apple nerds have been aware of the decline. It's finally reached an apex where it's getting a lot of blog posts. I really hope they're noticing (I think they are - John Gruber wasn't granted a live interview after criticizing their AI efforts last year), but I don't expect them to act rationally in response).
As a decades-long Apple nerd who feared the company would collapse in the 90s, it's fucking horrid.
0. The Fallen Apple - https://mattgemmell.scot/the-fallen-apple/
Ads on social media, youtube, everywhere seem to be a high % of scams, or weirdly creepy type health products, or creepily manipulative (and ironic) content like "if you're not using my 5 strategies then you're being manipulated".
What is most odd is that I wouldn't mind ads that were for things I want, but nobody seems interested in that angle, they want to just impose their stuff on me.
That's either incompetence or betrayal of trust. In both cases, the only solution is to be careful, boycott and press charges when something is illegal.
Use other platforms. Don't use Apple News. You could use an AI chatbot to find news for you. It has no ads, much easier to read, totally free, and tailored to your instructions.
ChatGPT: (sponsored) Buy this cute mug in the shape of a purse with AI created pictures of a dog! Just $19.99 (at 80% discount)
all ads are scams, in the sense that all cops are bastards - not so much that every individual cop is a bastard, more that the institution of advertising enshrines, encourages, and rewards scamming its audience. Do honest ads exist? Sure - but since you’ll never know which is which, you’re better off avoiding them as a rule, the risk is not worth the reward.
Is it possible to change the institution of policing, such that the bastards will be punished and excluded and removed as a general consideration? It’s possible, yes, but there are so many dollars tied up in the advertising industry that it’s pretty hard to imagine.
You would think that advertisers would understand that they are killing the goose? They have made ads pervasive, annoying and untrustworthy. Hence, fewer and fewer people are willing to put up with them.
Perhaps enshittification will eventually hit a wall. One can hope.
And doubtless many of them use intentionally use TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, etc, where "influencers" subtly (or not-so subtly) advertise to them in the native format of the platform.
Some of them are funded by scamming others, crypto, VC, etc. Even the first link in the article [0] has a VC backed startup advertising (they paid $11K!) that nobody asked for.
There is no such thing as an ethical ad whatsoever.
[0] https://daringfireball.net/2024/07/apple_taboola_sitting_in_...
I have seen a bunch of these. It is a wildly subtle way to get referral points. As the AI part is making it supper easy to mill these things out.
The most wild one I have seen is the 'ai scott adams'. The tone is in the right ballpark. Still a little odd but looking better after their first few attempts. I expect soon it will drop random adverts here and there. With the long con being getting people to watch it, then farm them.
A lot of scams and cons are deliberately stupid looking and absurd to pre-select for gullible marks.
It’s also why goofy conspiritainment shows are loaded with ads for quack medicines. Anyone who thinks we didn’t go to the moon will probably buy herbal dick pills.
I suppose that, ironically, well-intentioned doctors would indeed prefer that people not know about these "tricks" and other medical scams.
It's the very rare advert that speaks to you, and informs you, and simply makes you aware of its existence without the ridiculous, oversized, plastic cherry on top.
I own multiple personal Mac computers, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, iPad Pro, a few HomePods, and a few Apple TV devices. I’ve already proven that I’m willing to pay for a product even when there are cheaper alternatives. Why they decided to make News a paid subscription with ads — especially low-quality ads is beyond me.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve deleted the News, Stocks, and Weather apps, and will just remove any additional apps they decide to chuck in. It’s a real shame their aggressive pursuit of services revenue is destroying what is a great hardware ecosystem.
I don’t see ads on the weather app (at least on my phone)
-- Tim "Apple" Cook (paraphrased)
Actual quote from a few days ago:
> “Services also achieved an all-time revenue record, up 14 percent from a year ago [...] a testament to incredible customer satisfaction for the very best products and services in the world.”
Those two words definitely don't belong together.
I truly don't believe that there is enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News (or elsewhere) to generate to profit Apple expects.
Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold.
This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money.
Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.
Especially with the failed Apple Intelligence that they will now have to pay their way out of.
My thinkpad is from 2017, but I bought it in 2022, it's still working fine - I upgraded the memory to 32G (£70) and I've replaced the battery twice (once when I bought it, once a couple of months ago). When I replace it it will likely be because of hardware failure (droppping it etc).
They'll look good, work well (from hardware perspective), and you can replace their built-in Windows OS with the Linux flavor/edition of your choice.
By the way, if ultraportable is your idea of laptop nirvana, you can try... Samsung made awesome AI-powered laptops (the Samsung Galaxy Book5 and Book6), I got the Book5 few months back for my friend's son. It is sleek, lightweight and powerful.
Here is the TG review/verdict: https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/samsung-galaxy-b...
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. Ads are capitalist tools to get you to buy things, but in most cases, you get the thing you buy. I'm into photography, books, and music, for example, and the ads I see for cameras aren't scams, nor are ads for books or records. Some of them may attempt to to manipulate you to part with your money, but this sort of scam is different.
One problem with Apple News on the iPad or Mac is the size of the ads. Yes, I notice them and generally scroll past them, but they are huge and obtrusive. I've been noticing these obvious AI ads for a couple of months; especially the one with the mug or the totebags. But they have become endemic recently.
Someone I know said that he assumes all ads on Instagram are scams. I don't use IG, but I do use Facebook to keep up with local groups. There was a period where there were tons of those "going out of business ads," and I reported many of them. But I'd say about half the ads I see now are brands I know. Presumably, since IG uses the same algorithm and personal data, my experience there would be the same.
I think the problem with Apple News is that it's not widely used, and advertisers don't see it as a good place to spend their money. Since Apple started using Taboola, it's pure enshittification.
It's worth noting that in Apple's earnings call last year, they said that their profit margin on services was 78%. While Apple News probably doesn't account for much in that number, it seems like much of the company, as far as services are concerned, is aiming for cash over quality.
Also there is the converse proposition that: "all clicks are click fraud", that is, many web sites try to trick you into clicking on ads by making pop-ups that are hard to close, by making the layout shift so you click on an ad when you were trying to click a link, etc.
What I don't understand is why high-value brands sell their screen estate to straight up scams or low quality ads.
I think those of us on this forum likely grew up in a golden age of ads being relatively harmless, but I’m not sure that’s the normal state.
Most of the time, when people realize something, it happens NOW. Also, AI isn't even mentioned in the headline at all, and not even in the first part of the article. It's just used as one hint that it might be scam, then followed up with further evidence.
Now ads are just scams
I'll load up Facebook right now and get the same things. Google? The same.
And to no surprise, ads like these break Apple's ad content guidelines[1].
OP should figuratively put down the video camera and go perform CPR. Report the Ad. Make the internet a better place.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/adguide/apd527d891a8/1...
