Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both. I know the ads themselves aren’t new, but the steady increase is a worrying trend.
I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
I'm not selling my stock just of yet though, as investors like these moves. Layoffs also usually bump the stock price.
Apple has been a mess since they lost Steve Jobs.
It is possible they won’t pull it off for “AI,” of course. But we won’t know until when somebody finds a profitable consumer-facing application for these models.
I wouldn’t have expected Apple to introduce the first AI, for example. I definitely would have expected them to wrap it better than anyone and boy was I wrong about that.
But their innovative design tends to be in hardware and supply chains.
Where Apple can do something useful is using AI to integrate solutions to real world stuff throughout the OS. These features are rarely flashy, but they become an indispensable part of people’s daily workflow.
Current LLMs also seem to have a much higher tolerance for hallucinations than Apple does. I’d rather wait for something good and reliable than have them rush out a copy-cat chatbot that lies to me. People are much more forgiving with OpenAI than they’d be with Apple.
They should release iphone pocket mankini edition as their hallmark of innovative design
I’m inclined to think of that as innovation. To your point, not a single, earth shattering kind (inventing the first mp3 player), but by 100 lesser improvements in a single product.
But yeah, all their stuff is that way. They didn’t invent smartphones, or satellite messaging in a phone, or rich mobile messaging, or end to end encryption of data on your cloud services, or biometrics and secure enclaves, etc. They just usually execute better than others.
Because there are many entirely-feasible things that Apple failed to execute well. Xserve, Airpower, Apple Car, all dead and buried in one way or another. Today, all their tentpole successes are difficult to distinguish from pervasive marketing influence. We can't logically use sales, customer satisfaction or user retention as metrics to measure how successful services iCloud or the App Store are. And, with integrated products like Airpods and Apple Watch, the iPhone nearly reaches similar levels of arbitrary lock-in.
I think the iPad is a good example. Bill Gates had a dream of the paperless office and tried to make the tablet PC happens by putting Windows XP on tablets with some pen support. I saw a few of them in my help desk days in college, but they never really caught on. They put a desktop OS on a tablet and it was annoying to use. They also tried handheld devices with the UMPCs, these were also a pain to use, and again, just ran XP.
Then the iPad came along. It didn’t just run OS X, it ran an OS designed around the way you’d interact with it. It was executed better. Steve Jobs also sold the hell out of it with all his “magic” talk. 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about. Microsoft had a 10+ year head start, but failed to execute and market. They didn’t understand what they were actually making. Android tried to copy the iPad model with a mobile OS, but they didn’t seem to go all-in, so it felt half baked. Much of the iPad “marketing” is word of mouth. My dad had 2 iPads and loves them. He was sold on it by seeing be use one back in 2010 to take note and a conference we went to. He spent more time looking at the iPad than the speakers. Ironically, I don’t have an iPad anymore, it never fit into my workflow, but for many it does.
The marketing only works to remind people of the products of the core product executes well. Marketing alone won’t save a bad product. This is especially true when trying to create a category. Apple has seemed more successful with category creation than just about anyone else. They may not be first, but they define the market and get people to care about it. They did this with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. MP3 players, smart phones, tablets, and smart watches existed before, but were fairly niche. Apple made them mainstream and opened up the market for others to be more successful as well. We can likely credit Apple with that modern laptop as well, starting with the MacBook Air, and then raising the bar on battery life with their new chips. They pushed the whole industry forward. This wasn’t marketing, it was execution. Having 24 hours of battery life in a thin and light package was simply better than the other options on the market.
But yeah, that was decades ago. And with Jobs, innovation has left.
. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Your statement is in itself a testament to their success in marketing and something which can be seen in many places: someone develops a product, the product gets some traction on the market, people seem to like the concept. Other companies also start making similar products which also gain some traction but it remains just that, a new product in a sea of many such. Then along comes the fruit factory which takes the product, wraps it in its trademark Dieter Rams-inspired shape, puts a large fruit stamp on it and markets it to the bone to their loyal audience. Pretty soon that audience will claim that the product was 'invented' by the fruit factory, that it is 'insanely great', that nobody has done something like this before and if they did they copied it from the fruit factory, etc.
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either.
Besides the point: I personally find the Nomad Jukebox and other MP3 players from the era extremely ugly, while the iPod looks beautiful and has become an icon (yes, Rams-inspired, but that's not a bad thing). I say this as a decidedly non-Apple-fanboy, but as an industrial designer.
I'm confused by this take. We've had this for over a decade? Technology is not holding this idea back. It just sucks big time for every situation except driving. Talking to a computer is dumb, but Knight Rider nailed it.
The UI for setting up a daily alarm is a little clunky, since it requires individually selecting each day. I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours. Instead of doing this manually, I asked Siri to do it and it was much easier.
As an easter egg, you can even use some Harry Potter spells. “Lumos” will turn the flashlight on, “nox” will turn it off.
Not everything needs a bunch of AI. Most OS operations and settings are probably better without it, other than maybe for helping to process intent if it’s unclear.
In case you didn’t know, there is a medication reminder built into Apple Health that might work better than an alarm.
Wow, who could have expected that to happen?!
Yeah, not gonna happen, no ads means ownership of a device. That must be prohibited at all cost. Unless you are one of those pesky grapeneos users that block ads but they'll soon be excluded from any public discourse by eID enforcement.
You vill watch tze Ads and you vill eat tze bugs.
In all likelihood, we will pay an extra $100 AND have ads.
And if you think there's a definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading, I think that's an extraordinary claim you have no evidence for.
Go lead a maoist insurgency or don't, but the fingerwagging moral appeal is worse than useless.
Well gee, when you put it like that all morality is relative huh?
It's fine if you're personally a coward or you just don't think it's worth it. But not only does it work, it is so far, the only thing that has ever been proven to work.
It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
I think users should have 0 tolerance for ads in the OS. It’s the broken window theory. Once they start, if the users don’t revolt, they will keep pushing them.
I find I don’t use the App Store much anymore. I used to browse it all the time, but it feels like one giant advertisement now.
Also available as part of Apple One if you buy 2TB of extra iCloud storage.
Only under our current cultural and economic assumptions.
I think we shouldn't hope those changes, that could lead to interesting times.
Whatever his faults, he had a high bar for user experience, a massive megaphone, and the respect of journalists, industry leaders, and the public.
Apple's market differentiator, under Steve Jobs, was that it wasn't shitty.
Jobs would regularly mock competitors publicly for the way in which they 'enshittified' their products (in words of the time, obviously). And his reputation was such that people listened.
We have a dearth of authority figures today; there's nobody around to shame bad actors.
Yeah, but what about next quarter?
Jokes aside, they're not the most valuable company anymore. Nvidia is ahead, I think MS has jockeyed with them on that position a few times and is still on their heels, and Google is ascendant (even ahead of MS as of end of close) after the antitrust clouds started to recede and Gemini started to match Claude and ChatGPT.
They can't sit idly forever if they want to please shareholders, and there aren't many avenues for expansion.
> Yeah, but what about next quarter?
Point being, why fuck with a strategy that is working? Is being #1 so important that you'll throw it all away because of an unpredictable and outlier event that isn't in competition with you? That seems incredibly irrational and a great way to lost your market advantage. It is incredibly myopic.
Of course they are, they are on the same stock market.
What, are you one of those that believe competition is still about capturing markets and appeasing customers?
Both app stores always felt like fumbling in the dumpster. Between the ads and the gambling, if you managed to find an app that treated you right it was like finding a baby who was somehow living despite choking in all the ashes
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads
Ma'am they literally sell ads through the apps on their app store
Both have had ads in apps, in app stores and on websites. This was never a differentiator.
If iOS goes that route I really don't know what the differentiator is
I watched an "Android user switched to iOS" YouTube video recently and it's interesting how much you don't see when you haven't been removed from an environment. This Android user was shocked at how much iOS advertises to you, which is not intuitively what any of us would think an Android user would be shocked by switching platforms. A lot of us iPhone users think that Android phones are like a used car sales lot with bloat apps and you can't delete Facebook and all that.
You know how when you haven't seen a friend for a long time and they've changed appearance? But if you see them every day you don't really notice the gradual changes as much. I think that's what's happening here: long time iOS users just don't see that Apple is using all the same tactics as Microsoft and Google in their OSes, but Windows especially is seen as hyper-commercial and ad-riddled.
iOS has what are effectively ads in the Settings page in exactly in the same way that you get critical updates which is crazy.
Every major OS update advertises some new feature that siphons up your personal data like Apple Intelligence. Heck, they suggest you turn analytics back on years after turning it off - every single major update! I know this is common practice but we have to pause and recognize that these things are advertisements.
You think Windows is bad with OneDrive and Copilot? At least you can uninstall those! Try removing Apple News on your Mac! You can't delete the app, not allowed!
Congratulations, you bought a piece of hardware from Apple, now you get a 3-month trial to [random service they run] and you will be notified about this in the settings page...again, right next to your critical security updates.
App Store? It's an ad platform, not a package manager. Sure, another industry standard, but it's not like Apple is some kind of unique premium company in this regard.
Apple TV is touted as having no ads, but it really does if you don't move Apples apps off the top row of the screen. For now, it's far less egregious than any other streaming box I can think of, but I imagine it's this way because the product is a bit of an afterthought that predates Apple's orange squeezing (we are the oranges).
Where do profits come from? Selling data, innovation, selling hardware, etc.
Biggest profit margins come from selling stuff you have to multiple buyers that costs you nothing to duplicate/produce.
My data can be sold to multiple buyers, multiple times to make that magic profit that shareholders want.
Just wait until everyone on this planet has apple devices, how will apple continue to grow ROI?
I guarantee you will do both soon
Currently, some developers try to get into your view by creating multiple similar apps, as that gets them screen space for free.
Given developers the ability to pay to have their app show above the sea of (almost) clones may revert that trend, as such developers would either have to pay for multiple adverts or to put all their money on one horse.
(It wouldn’t make the iOS App Store good, though. One thing it definitely also needs is clearer information on what features you get for free, what you can buy as add-on, and what requires a subscription)
Newsflash: the first slot in an app store search is an ad that is not marked as such. Your extra $100 are already wasted.
Here's a nice ad I ran into recently:
I was trying to install microsoft authenticator and the first "result"... I don't want to know what that is.
If they add more ads at the top I suppose I'll have to only use external searches to install apps.
Maybe it's clear to you... or you work in marketing and have a different definition of "clear".
Note that this is a screenshot from a hi dpi iphone that went through a few upload/download/reencode cycles [1] so it lost all density information. On the real phone screen the "Ad" thing is extremely tiny and unnoticeable.
[1] Downloaded it from my work chat where i posted it as a warning to my colleagues a couple days ago.
Btw, I'm checking now, the label "ad" is not there, it's just highlighted. Or is it that blue tag? I thought that signified in-app ads? Shouldn't the highlight itself have a label? Probably this is some A/B test optimized BS, that tag was the option where most people WRONGLY clicked on the stuff they didn't search for.
When I came from Android I first couldn't figure out why app store search was so bad. Dumb me, expecting the highlighted option to be something most relevant to ME and MY search, no it's most relevant to some paying company and can even be a scam. And you and me can reason through this, but my kids get this BS as well, the grow up with this as normal.
You search for something, you don't get what you search for. This is our normal.
Absolute disappointment on day 1 with iOS.
My next phone will be something like FairPhone with e/OS or Sailfish. Or I'll wait for that Graphene hardware partner stuff to finally be revealed. I'm so sick of this bs. You pay a lot of money for something and they slap you with ads. Same on smart TVs, my Philips Hue system (hundreds, maybe thousands of euros I spend on that), ads ads ads.
Absolute garbage experience, and I came from Android expecting to "the luxury platform", I paid 2x what I usually do for a Phone. What a disappointment in step 1.
Context: we're migrating to MS cloud services at work from Google so everyone is setting up accounts, authenticators etc. Pretty seamless migration overall btw, guess our admins worked like dogs.
So I post this screenshot in a work chat as a warning (that's why i still have it). All my Android using colleagues tell me "it's the same in the Play Store, watch what you click."
We've lost.
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
Though lately I feel like Apple is just really bad at being... Apple
It's like they are dumping all the good parts and doubling down on all the bad parts. Things are far from "just working", have more glitches/bugs, but at the same time they're increasing hostility towards developers and walled garden. At least with Android (or linux) I can fix any issues but with Apple it's more "fuck you, deal with it." This was frustrating but passable when it was more streamlined but now? God fucking damnit I swiped one word just fine but when swiping the second word you decide the first word wasn't correct and none of the suggestions are what I'm intending to type but pressing delete deletes both words and now I can't swipe the original word because you already decided I'm not trying to type that word because I pressed delete? This is version of Apple is just rotten... When literally typing on a phone is a daily frustrating experience you know you fucked up. I mean how long have they even failed to capitalize a singular "i"? What the fuck is going on over there?
Side note:
Try searching "Claude" in the iPhone app store. For me I get a half page ad for Gemini, a small result for Claude, and then a larger result for Grok. Literally the thing I searched for, and has an unambiguous result, is the smallest thing on the page! This is some bullshit dark patterns that is very anti-user.
"You are holding it wrong", maybe it's intentional and Apple decided that you should use Siri more
When a company that sits on enormous reams of cash, and positions itself as a premium brand, goes for a fistful of dollars more per customer by showing them ads, it can mean two things. One is that it's a cold calculated move, another, that it's clueless enthusiastic "brilliant idea". In either case, the company is going to burn a lot of its customers' goodwill, and much of its longer-term prospects, in exchange for some more immediate revenue, and higher stock valuation.
What looks like stupidity in doing such a move is more likely cynicism. The corporate officers who will reap the benefits will have retired by the time when their successors would have to handle the fallout. It's not stupidity, it's rot at the highest echelons.
This would explain the really poor recent software decisions, and the general decline of its quality.
But at least Apple still has amazing, best-in-class hardware! Well, like Nokia did. And like Blackberry did. Like Boeing used to.
Sad :(
Sitting on a tons of value (even though backed by users trust) gives no rest to Apple's managers who just does not connect the dots between users trust and profits.
Or they think they are a monopoly. Maybe Apple is?
How?
You can get insights into user behavior without ads, and I'm sure Apple is doing that already.
Doesn't making good products that people want give more insight to user needs? Who wants ads?
You're already paying a huge premium on the phone.
I always wonder how apple's marketing team pulled this off.
- If you use any decent browser like Firefox* (or its different clones) one get enhanced privacy, no ads, byepasspaywalls etc. - Even Chromium forks have decent adblocking - Using NewPipe (like revanced opensource) for ad free YouTube
All my iOS friends scroll through so many ads - admittedly - SIM/data is paid for my their employers but it is awful experience.
* -> Don't be pendantic and point out yesterday's Verge article that Mozilla is becoming bad.
Turns out that doesn't work, either
With the average lifetime of a phone these days $100 might not justify it.
I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.
Be careful in the App Store!
Proper torrent search sites have a comments section that you should check before downloading anything :)
join a private tracker friend :)
I don't know what it is with Apple, maybe they aren't sufficiently exposed to scams, but they seem to not understand it's an issue, or their metrics are solely based on revenue. Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.
Exactly this, the same reason why Facebook relies on scam ads for at least a third of their revenue.
Still an unfortunate development though.
A platform that doesn't let you simply install a desired package without being shown ads is kind of crazy but it's basically industry standard for everything that's not Linux.
Let me put this another way: if you want to manually kick off app updates, you literally have to see ads. App Store > Today tab (the default view) has ads. Then you hit your profile button to escape the ad center and there is your app update interface.
This has been normalized by basically all commercial OS platforms, but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade or brew upgrade displayed ads before your packages downloaded.
Apple even shows ads for stuff like Apple Music/TV+/Fitness/News+ free trials in the settings pane.
And people give Microsoft shit for having ads in their platform...at least they don't show you ads in Windows Update!
So what already happens when you ssh into an Ubuntu server to run apt upgrade to manually update it. It turns out people don't care that much.
Apple's enshittification is real, and accelerating.
Is it? I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from Apple's app store. Hmm. What have I got? Chrome. Installed from website. GIMP. Installed from website. LibreOffice. Installed from website. VSCode. Installed from website. VLC. Installed from website. Zoom. Installed from website. Homebrew. Installed by using a command from a website. And then, a bunch of stuff installed from brew.
I’ve got my banking apps, business apps, Strava, etc. the same now, for years. It would take a monumental effort from Apple for me to feel like “cruising” the App store, the idea is so patently ridiculous to me, I actually LOL’d thinking about it. Literally any other portable device is better to play games on - Switch, Steamdeck, 3DS, Atari Lynx, etc.
I have Apple Arcade as well (included with something else), I can’t even remember the last time I could be bothered to scroll that…
If Apple thinks more ads is a solution to some of their problems, things must be way worse than imagined over there.
Seriously, playing the "free market" card in the tech (especially mobile) space is really brave.
It took them 20 seconds and a number of very specific button presses (sometimes mis-clicked because the size of the 'correct area' to dismiss the ad is so small and this was an adult male with our sausage-sized fingers) before they could show me the thing they were intending to show me. And that 20 seconds was after the ad had finished playing.
How do people settle for such an experience?
As an app developer, I used to have to outbid everyone to get the one and only spot. Now I need only outbid the top 3 bidders (or however many slots there are).
I advertised for many months back when App Store ads first started, and it was worth the expense because of higher sales. I no longer advertise because the one and only slot is far outbid what that slot is worth to me, and that I can recoup without spending a lot or raising the price for the app.
So I chose not to advertise and keep the app price lower.
It's the Amazonification of the App Store. Next it'll morph into more ads than legitimate results. Your app won't show up at all unless you pay your mafia dues.
This would be like if Disney put a press release out bragging about how Mickey Mouse was going to help sell alcohol sales inside their theme parks.
One thing I've noticed with the Play Store is that top-level advertised app results are, more often than not, totally unrelated to what I searched for, and therefore completely useless as both a suggestion to the user and an 'opportunity' for the app creator. In fact, it usually invokes a 'this app must be a scam' response from me.
Thank you, Apple, for increasing the number of opportunities for getting scammed and manipulated on your platform. I will be telling my friends.
I immediately lost some respect for Apple “so this is the expensive luxury platform people talk about?”
I hate that “we” focus on the second derivative to determine value (not just growth but speed of growth). It’s just for the shareholders, meanwhile us customers are looking at a company that is rich beyond believe thinking: “Seriously??”
I wrote an app for my company and put it on Apple's app store. It was basically IMPOSSIBLE to find. You could search for the company's exact name (it was the publisher of the app), and it did not appear in the top 300 results (which is where I gave up).
What I caught Apple doing was essentially hijacking the company's (trademarked) name and not showing it, but rather any and every alternate spelling of a similar word... or listings that had no part of the string in their name or description at all. The search string was not present in ANY part of the vast majority of search "hits."
I complained to Apple, and after being blown off once with a bullshit boilerplate response, I mentioned legal action in defense of our trademark. Then they addressed my case with a lie: They claimed that the publisher name is one of the top three search criteria. That is utter bullshit, in practice.
This is misleading - does it mean people are searching for an app that they already know about and want to download - chatgpt, samsung, gmail etc. Or searching for a topic or problem and see what apps are available - LLM, camera, running etc.
I rarely do the latter - using web search to find reviews or asking an LLM to give me a list comparing the features and then search for the apps in the appstore (trying to ignore the ads)
Apple was the one vendor you could buy stuff from to be able to look down on the peasants bombarded by ads all the time. Now, when I specifically search for an app in the App Store, the result is barely on the screen because it is filled with an ad for another. You get deeply embedded ads and nudges for iCloud pretty often. It already sucks. It‘s like they hate USPs.
ChrisArchitect•3h ago