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Fitness+ is actually super high quality, really well integrated with Apple’s products, and fun to use. I love it. I would happily pay the monthly Apple fee just for fitness+. I hope they don’t change it.

If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.

They tried to kill _competitors'_ ads. Everyone else gets "Ask Not to Track" while Apple gets "Personalized Ads." It's so glaring once you see it.

TV is pretty good even for my English sensibilities. Severance is some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

As someone who owns zero apple hardware, I feel like Apple TV (the service) is probably the most consistent producer of high quality TV shows.

I actually like Fitness+, it got me working out for the first time in my life.

Against Youtube Music and Spotify, Apple Music rates quite well, at least IMO.

"customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better.

"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.

Apple Arcade is pretty good, I imagine it's good for parents that want to make sure their kids are playing actually decent games instead of whatever slop you find on the app store or roblox

Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.

"The only people who call customers 'users' are drug dealers and software companies."

> 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.

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.

Over the past decade, there's been a lot of regulation forcing Apple to open up their "Apple only" integrated platforms.

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.

It's definitely that publishers don't want it.

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.

It’s almost like Google AMP was a good idea and solving this problem this community had a melt down over it.

A clear difference here is that Apple creates the TV+ shows and they don't create the News+ content. And I really don't think they want to get into the news content creation business.

> At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

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.

I'd say the inflexion point was in 2015. That's when Apple Music launched, sidelining the iTunes store where you could buy songs, in favor of a rental model like Spotify. That's also when they discontinued the Mac Server hardware and ceded the enterprise software market to Microsoft and Adobe.

Since then it's been on a nonstop drive to jam as many subscriptions services into the iOS ecosystem as possible.

Yes on the last count for Apple U.

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.

Steve Jobs was all about the customer experience, hence so many of his famous quotes. Two like the most are:

- 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.

Old Apple had a productive tension between Jony Ive and Scott Forestall on which direction to go in with design, with Steve Jobs as a tie-breaker.

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.

>At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

The simple answer would be when SJ passed away. The long answer is there wasn't a turning point, but a long period of cultural shift, due to Tim Cook being CEO.

Tim Cook not immediately taking a CEO stand and left a power vacuum was a mistake. He said himself he thought everything would continue as normal, which obviously did not happen. Firing Scott Forstall was a mistake. Ive taking over software design was a mistake. Not listening to the advice of Katie Cotton and manage a new PR direction was a mistake. Following Phill Schiller advice of firing long time Marketing Firm for Apple was a mistake. Tim Cook not understanding his weakness which is his judgement of character was a big big mistakes, as it leads to Dixon CEO and Burberry CEO taking helms of Apple Retail, ultimately stoping if not reversed the momentum of Apple Retails improvement and expansion by 10 years. Giving Ive the power to play around with Retail Design because Apple Retail Store is somehow a "social place" was a big mistake. Prioritising Operational and Supply Chain Decisions over Design was a mistake after around iPhone 8 Plus. Too focused on sales metric and bottom line was a big mistake. Shifting to Services Revenue, which should have been AppleCare, iCloud or even iPhone Subscription model, instead they got Apple TV+, in my option is a mistake. They were too scared to hurt the relationship with Carriers. Eddy Cue taking over a lot of decisions? Apple going to Davos? Merging of different iOS and macOS team where it used to be teams per product but later became functions per team structure. Trusting China and didn't diversify their production when Trump was first time in Office. ( They said they will but they didn't. Literally every single media lied on behalf of Apple ). I mean the list goes on and on.

I really like someone on HN said about Apple. Ever since Steve Jobs passed away Apple has been left on auto pilot mode for most of its time.

Remembering state is a giant oversight on many apps for content consumption, Apple News included. I sometimes read long articles on Apple News. I could be interrupted by a call or some messages. When I return to Apple News, it displays my half-finished article for a split second and returns to the home screen.

This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.

Apple does have their own ad network. This is their ad network.

https://ads.apple.com/

You can definitely block ads- try NextDNS.

90% of the content in the News+ app is itself an ad.

Any ad provider that is going to serve up scams to anyone is an ad provider I don’t trust. Giving more information to an untrustworthy company seems like a losing plan. Those more target ads also mean more effective manipulation to get people to buy things they likely don’t need.

That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

I don’t think that it’s possible to not have a strong profile on you. I’m using Librewolf with a ton of anti fingerprinting tools, separate sessions for everything, blocking any ads, social media SDKs, Google things, like Analytics, don’t even use Google anywhere for search etc on a Debian. Yet, Google knew immediately when I started to play Minecraft. The only connection was embedded YouTube videos on Minecraft wiki, and my ip. On paper.

Since then I gave up. I tried everything which was reasonable, even some unreasonable. Yet, I couldn’t stop them not knowing. Maybe if I had blocked JavaScript completely, maybe, but I’m not sure at all anymore.

> When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots.

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.

I consider even "legitimate" ads scams. My products are more expensive (the marketing budget doesn't fall out of the sky, after all), and I am rewarded by being forced to view extremely annoying content in my day-to-day life? As a consumer, that sounds like a horrible deal to me!

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.

This sounds brilliant, makes too much sense, and suggests a new kind of ad blocker to escalate and reflect retribution back.

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.

In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.

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.

Alternative POV: the better they profile, you the better they can slip the scams past your defenses

Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins? The intuitive dynamics to me would be that any way to trick consumers will be applied, and the bulk of the resulting spread will be captured by the ad companies via their auction systems. So we all get worse products with worse deals, and the difference goes into spying on people and convincing them to become more consumptive, i.e. to turn them into worse versions of themselves.

Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.

Having a strong profile makes one vulnerable to more convincing scams, which is much more dangerous.

I'm pretty sure the only ad that would work on me would be an ad for an indie game, but indie game developers don't buy ads, they buy blue checkmarks on twitter then they try to game the algorithm. Even if I did see an ad for an indie game, I would probably not click on it, but just google its name instead.

What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.

But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.

In theory user behavior to serve you ads you want to see for stuff you might be interested in is a feature. The problem comes because the same technology to power that can also power the—much more lucrative—industry of serving ads that are optimally designed to fry your brain and scam you. And then on top of that, it creates a business incentive for you to use a lot of psychological tricks and dark patterns to foster increasingly addictive and anti-social behavior to keep people stuck in a feedback loop of doomscrolling.

Such a terrible take...

Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.

HN has been overwhelmingly astroturfed since at least 2010.

Kids today learning about the FTC and standards... we used to be a real country, with real laws that actually helped real people.

No there is another way. We can ban advertising completely.

Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts.

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.

Meanwhile in real life IG and TikTok ads are the only ones normal people seem to generally trust. I've only ever heard people talking about getting Instagram or TikTok ads for things and actually buying them in a way that would sound genuinely jarring if they said "an ad on Google."

I think there's something to be said for how IG and TikTok ads are actually made that makes them more appealing which is that they actually try to be worthwhile content to watch in a way banner ads and TV commercials just aren't.

Visiting friends/family sometimes I have to ask for the TV to be turned off so we can talk and visit. Not to make some sort of statement or signal my dislike for the content, but to stop having my attention grabbed over and over for useless dribble/ads. They do not understand how horribly distracting it is to someone who isn't numbed to its omnipresence.

It’s horrible on mobile. Sites like macobserver are bad. Two videos overlapping, popping in and out, shifting content.

I also use adblock and what ends up happening as a consequence is the ads I do see are the shittiest of shitty ads that don't even come from a recognized network. :)

I don't think I am immune to propaganda, and definitely not ads. I can't stand ads at all. They immediately grab my attention, even if I make a conscious attempt at ignoring them. It truly feels terrible.

Even for propaganda, I am constantly made aware of my propaganda immunity being subpar for all different kinds of propaganda. Often it's just subtle seeds of propaganda that impact the choice of words that I use to be something different than what I really believe in, and sometimes it is more serious and deeper cases of propagandisation. Very unfortunate, but each time it shows me why I should be critical of everything that I read online.

"marketing works on you, even if you know how marketing works on you"

Thank you! I’ve been searching for a term to describe this type of “ad blindness”.

I’ve also trained myself to recognize and not consume ads anywhere they are not blocked.

just made me flashback to a url bar and typing that too long of a url

I actually tried Ground News for a while because, you know, why not? I appreciate what they're trying to do, but the signal to noise ratio was so, so unfavorable between the UI clutter, the curious lack of certain categories, and the oddly slow update rate.

I've always wanted a mug that has an "Ecgraronic| handle sin.]"!

I mean how could you not want to own a piece of hand-painte perfectly restody that perfectly restores the V8 engine red?

> interlocking ars

OwO

I gave it to a friend, but think the cup shown, with painted by an amateur model enthusiast. Not quite right colours, not quite right places...

https://i0.wp.com/kirkville.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/I...

The era of Tim Apple is definitely different from Jobs; had he seen an ad like that he'd have fired half the company.

But management by metrics means line go up? All is good.

Yeah it was always a trick scammers used. Scam emails (the more obvious ones - not sophisticated phising) always had typos or subtle grammar errors because authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes. It's the people that do not read thoroughly that are much more likely to fall for a scam.

I would imagine it might be the same with those ads.

You'd think so.

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 just use “New Tab Redirect” in Chrome so I can make new tabs default to google.com. The home page only applies to the initial browser window/tab. It’s pretty silly.

The "ever changing/enshittifying Edge" was the final nail in the coffin on Windows for me...that made me to change to MacOS for good.

Because it's probably extremely profitable, unfortunately. I have seen many of my coworkers click on the headlines and ads on the MSN homepage when bored at work.

I have used Apple products for over 20 years, because I felt like a customer instead of the product. Apple’s services strategy has changed this perception. I question Apple’s competitive advantage when they shift to a Google-like business model. They are actively throwing away the very thing that made them a unique and valuable player in the industry, and for what? A couple extra percent profit in the short term?

Steve Jobs always said he wanted to make insanely great products for customers. Products they’d be proud to recommend to their family. It feels like Cook lost his way, spending too much time focusing on the stock, instead of letting great products drive adoption, and letting the stock follow.

If the rumors are true that Apple is preparing for a change at the top, I how we see a dramatic change in the services strategy and Apple can get back to making great products that people actually want to use.

I'm already questioning it. The software quality just keeps getting worse.

You can uninstall almost all of Apple's apps now. Even things like the clock and the calendar. Not sure why the parent chose to leave News installed.

Then they are fools. I left a one-star review and uninstalled it.

I was always a bit confused by the "doctors don't want you to know about" line until I understood that it's in a rather US-centric cultural context where doctors are seen as just wanting your money. Though there's probably also the idea that practitioners of mainstream Western medicine are hostile to "alternative" remedies and don't want you to try the latter even assuming that they're actually effective.

I suppose that, ironically, well-intentioned doctors would indeed prefer that people not know about these "tricks" and other medical scams.

I tried clicking one of those just to see and it didn’t even go to the alleged product but instead a landing page with even more of those ads! Shocking, I know :)

Thankfully at least for YouTube there's Sponsorblock to filter out that junk as well.

What’s wrong with the weather and stocks apps? Maybe a silly question.

My local supermarket advertising on YouTube that they have a sale on coffee this week is pretty legitimate. It just doesn't buy the Alphabet shareholders a new yacht.

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.

Not only that but it's also quite difficult to find a laptop with an ANSI keyboard in an ISO country. My choices are basically an overpriced new Macbook (MacOS is the main con here), an overpriced new Thinkpad (brand new ones are horrible value since it tanks just a year after purchase), a Clevo (much worse build quality and questionable Linux support), or a Framework (worse build quality and mediocre battery life). As much as I hate MacOS, my M1 Macbook is still better at just being a light machine I can take anywhere and be working with immediately, while still lasting over an entire workday regardless of what I do. I really wish that Lenovo would fix their X9 Gen1 Linux support as those laptops are basically what I'd run if I could have proper support.

I know that Windows 11 doesn't get a ton of love on HN, but I have successfully replaced my M1 MacBook Air with a Surface Laptop 7. The build quality is great, and I even think that the Surface's haptic trackpad is superior. However, I don't think anything on the market beats the Macbook's speaker quality.

my goodness we lived with plastic thinkpads for decades and many of us still happily do. this fetish for "premium" hardware to be replaced every two years by the newest hottest thing (if that's not you: great, the planet thanks you) is just plain weird from the outside.

Get any gaming laptop or corporate grade laptop.

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...

MacBooks are nice but: priorities. If the choice is between avoiding selling out your brain to adtech, tracking and AI slop baked into the OS or having something that feels good to touch then bring me the e-waste bin and let me fish out some creaky plastic garbage with a 768p TN panel that I can slap Debian on. I care about nice hardware, but I don't care that much.

I would recommend fighting the 'oh it needs to FEEL premium' feeling. It doesn't, you're just spoile by companies who know exactly how to sell you crap specially designed to just feel nice. You're being played like a fiddle by marketing departments.

Vote with your wallet and buy an Android phone without ads and trackers? What is this FUD?

I dunno, I’ve been doing some genealogy research and looking at a lot of newspapers from the 1800’s. It’s striking to me how much they are essentially Facebook. Sure, on the front page there’s the news of the day, but on the inside are jokes, riddles, local notes on who visited who and where. And the ads. Literal snake oil! As well as all sorts of other sketchy tonics for curing any sort of “ill constitution”.

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.

Where does the author claim or even remotely suggest that?

Even online I get a lot of ads for goods/services I do use, or could see myself using.