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.)

- 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Contrasted to Microsoft's philosophy where no one is allowed to have a good experience, it's a breath of fresh air.

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.

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?

I honestly don't know this is just a question.

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.

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.

That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen icons didn't look so ugly with black background.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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://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.

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.