I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
Don’t mix apples with oranges Steve was The Apple those guys are CE—replaceable-O-ranges. If board and shareholders want ads there is no one to tell them get lost anymore.
I haven’t worked for Apple but you’re definitely correct. Just compare what Jobs said about using a stylus with how happy the company was to announce that you could use Apple Pencil with the iPhone duo. It is self-evident. It’s far from the company Jobs once ran.
You’re misunderstanding that quote. “If you saw a stylus they blew it!” referred to requiring a stylus to interact with the touch display. Having one optional, mainly for drawing, isn’t quite the same thing.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
Jobs has long been vocal about protecting the user experience. Not 100% sure if it's true, but I heard Jobs was originally opposed to custom apps running on the iPhone (the App Store), because he 'didn't want to turn iPhone in Windows'.
Jobs was right. Apps are so shitty now I don't even bother. Everything has a subscription now and there's so much noise its hard to actually find signal on the appstore.
It wouldn't have died - most apps are still just a thin UI over a corresponding online service, and most of the data and services proprietary APIs provide ended up achievable in a browser too. The performance increases, connectivity and screen quality improvements all carry through.
All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
It's not a root account issue, it's that they have already bought all the services there are to buy. One would assume that once you buy a service, they would stop prompting you to buy it.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
No, hardening has nothing to do with it. They have a feature flag system deeply embedded in their software. And such systems can totally distribute different flags to different people. And that's how you could easily create VIP accounts with different behaviors than the rest of the world, like all ad festures turned off.
Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).
In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.
> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.
What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies
Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).
iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.
Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.
What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.
> What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.
Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.
I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage
Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.
Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).
Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)
Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.
I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.
Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.
Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…
it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.
> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
I think some of it just that different people have different priorities. Some of what protected Apple was vanity. I think Steven Jobs cared about how people saw him and his products. He wanted to be the guy who made a premium product that he thought was cool and was proud of. The longer time went on, the less Apple execs cared about what he would have wanted and started caring more about what they wanted.
I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.
Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.
I think the Apple Effect was largely a result of personal narcissism.
Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.
The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.
Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.
The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.
The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.
I think it's not just Apple. Everyone and every company seem to become greedier and greedier. Economically, the world is not in a great place, apart from a minority which just gets richer and richer.
While I don't know, my suspicion is that the market is saturated, but the company is still hungry for "numbers go up".
"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.
It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?
I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?
I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.
I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.
> I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.
But you can just use the browser with an adblocker for Youtube on the phone, which also allows you to play audio in the background for free e.g. for playing music, what's the point in using the app at all?
> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
From what I've seen of GrapheneOS, it's not a luxury product, it's a product for tinkerers, who don't mind finicky granular configs. If I'm paying a premium, I expect sensible, privacy respecting, defaults that I can use out of the box. Not constant fumbles until everything is "setup".
I don't think there's any defaults you need to change out of the box besides installing the apps you want.
But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.
As someone who has daily driven both side by side as much as I love GOS, AOSP / Android absolutely does not feel premium compared to iOS. Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS. And the FOSS apps on Android are extremely subpar in terms of feel compared to iOS (off the top of my head look at how bad the Fossify Contacts app is compared to Google Contacts) but that’s the trade-off.
I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.
No android auto? What are you basing this on? I ask because I am responding from grapheneos while connected to android auto, and I am concerned I am in the wrong universe again.
Funny enough, the only part of Apple Pay I use with any frequency is the browser/app integration part, basically as a much more convenient alternative to PayPal sometimes.
IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.
I agree about cash, but we are talking about a luxury experience. In fact, GrapheneOS has talked about it [1].
> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance
I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.
There is Android Auto. There's contactless payments in Europe through Curve, Paypal, and some specific banks. Some companies are working on bringing them to the US.
In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.
At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.
> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!
Wow, I read it as "John Temu", which seems to be what Apple is being turned into.
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.
I have a script to add an /etc/hosts entry for `127.0.0.1 gdmf.apple.com` and that seems to eliminate any nagging, just remove when it's time to update.
I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
My experience was the same. GNOME is by and far imo the best DE on Linux when it comes to consistency and being the most accessible to non-technical users. However it’s far, far behind macOS’ UX.
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
this is a fair point. I am referring to more "objective" things, if anything can be, in design. Let's take as an example the alt+tab behaviour with multiple virtual desktops. In GNOME, as it is in Windows too by the way, alt+tab cycles inside the virtual desktop you're in, allowing for efficient matrix-like navigation, and allowing to split tasks between desktops. On Mac OS, alt+tab cycles on all your open programs, making you jump between desktops. To me, this is rather unintuitive. It could be habit, but there is a clear difference in result regardless of habits, and I think the most productive choice is the GNOME-Windows one, and the more "intuitive" one in the sense of what a user might expect out of a virtual desktop, that is, creating a new desktop with its own apps. Of course this is my impression and I am well free not to buy a Mac :)
You can do that same thing just a little different way. Say you want to go through all open apps in one desktop. On my mac its 3 fingers scroll up on trackpad then all windows are exposed. Basically the same function as what you want. Yes technically you are clicking on a window not the application icon but who cares.
My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to use GNOME. There are a ton of window managers that run on Linux, and you can find one that works better for you.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
Mac is just a different philosophy. Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management. That is possible for you. There are several tools for this, e.g. Amethyst.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
It's linux, you can do everything in the terminal. I've never understood what purpose a "desktop" serves.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.
Same here, I’ve gone from Apple fanboy to slowly dropping all of my Apple products as it becomes time for new purchases. They are just no longer looking at users like me. They keep focusing their efforts on things I don’t care about, while locking me out of control over my system more and more each macOS release. That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old… why bother fighting that?
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
> That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.
This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.
Yes they do offer security updates for what, 7 years? That I consider “kind of ok.” Not great. And yes most Android phones are even worse than that. But OS and application updates? You’re dead to them after 4 or 5 years. AND the whole ecosystem follows suit, so if your Mac is like 6 years old, almost nobody is writing software that works on your system anymore.
I’ve managed to move all of my inner circle family and friends to Signal. We always had one holdout android user and now we don’t care that he’s on android. As a bonus, because I’m on a computer much of the day, I can use a keyboard to send signal messages.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
I feel like Apple is always pushing the dev side forward in pretty awesome but small ways.
I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking
HDMI out works great on M1 and M2 chips, and DP alt mode output is nearly ready, and works if you compile an experimental kernel. I daily drive an Asahi Linux ALARM M1 Pro macbook, and I have almost zero complaints.
> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.
I have no loyalty, I've switched back and forth several times. I haven't concluded that either is better than the other, just different (and these days, not really -that- different). Though I do appreciate the tight integration between the iPhone and my MBP, that is definitely a sticky feature.
Same here. Owned every initial iPhone but went to Pixel a little while back and it's a much better experience.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
Me too. Android for the most part has much better UI.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
right now I have the same feeling; some time ago I felt that entering the iPhone "mindset" made sense as you could gain in ease of use by sacrificing some "control".
Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.
Agreed, I swapped to iPhone about 4 years ago, because I couldn't find a phone for myself from a tons of options(one company did that, another did something else, etc..).
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I honestly miss my Windows Phone, solid performance and battery life. The platform was never big enough for there to be much issue with third party apps and I could write what ever software I wanted and load it onto the phone without too much pain.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form.
They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.
The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.
There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.
Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.
I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.
Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.
My biggest gripe with windows is it will steal your cursor focus from password prompts. And when it surfaces a password prompt, it does not focus it automatically.
I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.
Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?
The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.
It makes sense to me as well, but mostly because I’m familiar with the UI in-and-of-itself. This is a website for computer programmers mostly, we’re exactly the wrong people to ask if a UI is intuitive.
OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!
I love MacOS and it’s my primary OS and I couldn’t agree with you more on every single one of your points.
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
I remember Tiger. Leopard was such a huge upgrade for it. I mean spaces alone, come on, that was huge. All the trackpad gesture control came after Tiger too with the larger unibody trackpads.
> Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that
It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).
> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.
It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.
> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.
> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great
The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.
> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder
The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.
> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.
> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.
The keyboard shortcuts are way more inconsistent on Mac. On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as entities. No such rule of thumb exists in Mac.
The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
Keyboard shortcuts on Mac are a lot more consistent than windows and Linux actually. On a Mac command + C / V is copy / paste. In Linux sometimes it’s control + c, sometimes it’s control + shift + c.
I guess what I mean to say is that there's no consistent paradigm for keyboard shortcuts. It's a lot more memorization and less real pattern to what keyboard shortcut will do what action.
And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.
That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.
Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.
These keyboard shortcuts are also used in emacs; I'm not sure if that's the source of their inclusion in MacOS or if they have a common ancestor between them.
What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?
I have used a lot of systems, and inside them a lot of programs (I make design choices for a living, even if they are at a lower level, UX and intuitiveness exists also in libraries). I was comparing Mac OS to GNOME and not to Windows because Windows is almost the same as Mac OS relative to my point, just worse.
It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.
>> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.
My unpleasant introduction to Apple Maps ads recently was opening it to look for nearby restaurants, and seeing an ad for a domestic violence lawyer nearby. Apple has now lost all credibility when it comes to respecting the user, not that they had much left at this point.
I just installed Google maps after 4 years and man it is shitty with cosntant recommendations and nags too. I just want a map and search and directions. But Apple maps is sooooo shitty at those...
I find Apple is better at turn-by-turn navigation, while Google is better at business and POI data. I will usually look stuff up on Google Maps, but use Apple Maps in the car for navigation. Google's navigation is (last I used it) bad at telling me what's next. I'll turn, it will say nothing, then wait until I'm right on top of something to tell me to do it... I find it stressful.
I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.
CoMaps works really well as a wrapper of OpenStreetMaps. It even has seemingly-accurate hours for a few businesses near me! And if you are willing to dig into accessibility settings on the iPhone you can choose a good quality voice for navigation.
But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that
I never noticed that with google myself. I will say between apple maps and google maps that google maps is far more accurate for traffic estimates. You may be tempted to go with apple maps sitting them side by side when apple says its 6 mins faster than google. That is not apple maps finding some magic route. That is apple maps being dumb.
Whenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them.
They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.
It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation requires more growth, and they're out of good ideas.
Look at any recent Apple revenue breakdown. If you pretend that the iPhone doesn't exist, Apple's most profitable market segment is services. Even the iPad and Mac can't dethrone it.
According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.
It's lousy that you can't turn off the badge notifications for the Settings app, which is where they push this garbage. I'm still on iOS 18, and I just have to live with a red '1' on my Settings app because I haven't updated my OS. It also pokes me every week or two to update.
It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.
Funny to read claims like that on techradar, that showed multiple pop-up frames around the 'article' and on top of it. But they haven't added an image of that 'ads'. No you have to read and try to understand what happened.
I thought the exact same thing. Of course, a key difference is that those of us who choose to pay for an iPhone, use iOS, and often pay for additional services are already giving Apple our money. They're trying to extract more and more from us and it's honestly insulting. I give techradar credit for providing us their user-hostile experience for free.
The title had me thinking they had actual adverts open to advertisers. It's not, just someone winging about apple advertising icloud+ and some other stuff in their settings app where you can directly enable it. Come on you lot, this is fine, it's like the least ad driven mainstream commercial platform.
The least crap of the crap is not a laudable position. I’m a big Apple fan but they need to stop this shit with advertising. The amount of advertising built in to a $1,000+ device, including ads for the device maker’s own services, should be exactly zero.
My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
You might want to check out the Bigme HiBreak phones, they're basically low-mid Android phones with e-ink screens. They work perfectly well for the dull functional things expected of a phone, while rendering all the addictive and spammy patterns pretty ineffective. I've found my one very useful as an intermediate step between a dumbphone and a traditional smartphone.
I tried out dumb.co. Their flip phone supports maps, MFA, Uber, imessage/call forwarding.
I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.
That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.
People are being intentionally obtuse in order to find something to get mad about.
Obviously offering upgrades to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.
Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.
If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.
I've tried clicking them away and they keep coming back. E.g. my current watch is about to hit a year old and doesn't have Apple Care. I clicked away anything about the Apple Card in Wallet and I just had it sitting right at the top when I was trying to get to my boarding pass last week. I have no idea why it keeps telling me about Apple Fitness or Apple Music each time I purchase a new device, I was aware of it the last 6 times it tried to push those.
I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.
From the article, many users report being unable to disable them:
> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."
> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.
There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."
Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.
Yeah, I kept getting a notification about purchasing and extended warranty for my AirPods, which was annoying because it shows up in the same place as OS updates.
best bet is currently GrapheneOS and that is still Adroid and will likely have to fight an up-hill battle in coming years
there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible
but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.
The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.
This is clickbait. The way they put "ads" in quotes every time shows they know what they're doing. I've seen some other comments here complaining about ads in Maps (which I've never used and can't speak to), but this article is specifically calling out the long-existing practice of Settings showing a little badge on new devices that says "You're entitled to some free months of Arcade/TV" or whatever. That's not an ad, or an "ad."
It's definitely an ad, but it's also been there for years now. And of all the ads I encountered across various platforms and spaces in real life, these are about the least obnoxious.
That's the thing, though. Those modal offer popups have been in macOS and iOS for a really long time, and does cheapen the experience like Microsoft and Google products do.
Apple promotes other Apple products in Apple products. End of the world. This yellow press is annoying. "Journalism". All this outrage to fullfill daily quota of text output.
And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.
It's not just iOS. Final Cut Pro on MacOS now regularly advertises iPadOS Final Cut Pro (which is a paid SaaS tool). Professional applications (arguments about Final Cut Pro X not being all that professional notwithstanding) that advertise like that are almost non-existent in the pro audio and video industry; an Apple pro app advertising, would have been heresy a few years ago.
And yeah, it drives me crazy. It's one more, wildly unnecessary, click.
Logic is one of the last tools keeping me tethered to MacOS. I've got 26 years invested in it, but the moment I open it up to record something and see an ad, it's over. Ardour and Bitwig will suffice, even if it means flushing tens of thousands of dollars of software down the toilet with it (the core suite of plugins I use).
I'm tired of unnecessary speed bumps in the creative process. It's why I no longer use a Roli Seaboard (what wildly awful software).
Apple continues down a course (addicted to ads, even their own) that I've seen few recover from.
There absolutely is a market for a new 'premium' smartphone maker to arrive.. But given the hardware prices currently, we are stuck with two companies who are purely now squeezing every cent they can out of us while destroying their experience.
Yes and they are the most unobtrusive “ads” you could possibly imagine. This thread is weird. There’s even a guy in here shilling for an unreleased “Elon Phone”.
for the first time in many years it’s these ads that have me looking at Android devices seriously. it’s the fact that they can’t be easily dismissed that bothers me the most (although clearly annoying even if they were quick to dismiss)
Comparing the Settings banner to the Start menu banner as seems a bit overblown. One you only see when you open settings, which is typically not daily or even necessarily weekly for most people; the other you see potentially up to hundreds of times a day, every day you that use your device. This article would have been a lot more meaningful if it had focused on the Maps app’s ads and the News app’s ads (by Taboola!), which do actively interfere with the quality of experience delivered and are enshittifying services provided, or the Game Center “try this other app” ads that float over other apps and can’t be disabled, in order to make the point that the badge ads were in fact the earliest harbinger of the slippery slope we always fear everything to be. Lacking any actual investment of effort along those lines, it reads more as wahmbulance chasing than meaningful news.
I find it ironic that I am attempting to read an article that says what it says while 80% of the screen is ads and asking me to register to their notifications.
Techradar complaining about Ads while it's showing three different full-screen popups while trying to just read the first paragraph of the article is certainly a choice
> Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
When you have willingly agreed to live your cyber life exclusively in the inside a golden jail, don't complain when the COs decide to collectively abuse you.
Thank goodness... I thought I was the only one complaining. Ever since Apple started putting ads in the App store, I started referring to them as an "ad company". Every time I search for, say, "Signal" and see the first result be a "promoted" link to "Whatsapp", my blood boils.
F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.
I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!
All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"
Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.
I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.
In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.
This is not new, I remember seeing those for the whole year (till potential Apple care promotion expires) when you buy a new phone years ago, and yes, they stay for weeks or longer.
I am a small developer on iOS and the App Store Search ads are super frustrating. When users search for my exact app name, apple shoves 2 full screen ads on top of the search results. Sometimes, it's 1 search results sandwiched in between 2 ads which makes the user miss it because they scrolled past the ads.
Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.
I've always found it crazy that if you search for a brand name / trademarked name that it's legal for the search provider to shove a bunch of vaguely related shit above the results unless that brand pays for ad placement to be the top result. Sure, fine, put whatever ad pays the most at the top of the search for "best iOS game" - but when someone searches "Wordle" - that you can't rely on Wordle being the top result is a indictment of the whole ad-supported internet. (Sub 'Claude' or 'Discord' or whatever other search term and it's the same issue)
It's worse than that. App names must be unique, but if you search for the exact (unique!) name, the exact hit isn't even rated on top! I have the app "Bit" on the app store and you have to do quite a bit of scrolling, even if you don't count the ads.
Same problem here too. I have a game called "Unscramble!" and it's impossible to find it with that name. I have scrolled for many pages and can't find it. Meanwhile, many very old apps which haven't been updated in many years are showing in the results.
when i am looking for a specific app on the App Store, I never use the app store to search. I search the web and look for a link to it on the app store. Mostly it's faster that way.
I went to Apple to de-Google, 5 years in and I just went to GrapheneOS to de-Apple (and re-Google just a bit too much for comfort but ok).
The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".
Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).
I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)
But Apple must enshittify all Apple products because it increases shareholder value. Else an activist shareholder will arise and accuse Ternus of dereliction of duty.
True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.
The one I have is also lying to me, it says: "Activate iCloud Storage - An iCloud storage upgrade is ready to be used with your Apple Account "account@icloud.com". Continue"
I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.
I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.
Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.
I've suffered the iCloud ads for almost 2 years at this point. You can't dismiss it, or if I can... the badge only disappears for a day and then it's back. I wish I could turn off iCloud completely, I have no use for it and do not want it. It sometimes hijacks files that I wanted to keep local-only.
This is exactly the moment Elon has been expecting to launch his always connected phone, offer superb quality, with unique features at a price even higher than Apple and I know for sure it will make inroads in their market share. Give devs all the tools and the ecosystem will surpass both iOS and Android, just like Huawei is doing in China
Options is all we need, and tools to customize them. And just like Blackberry or Nokia, they will learn the hard way
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...
Source - worked at Apple ~2010.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
I bet they don’t see any ads, because their accounts will have the highest tier (or even a special one above that) of everything.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
> internal email from Bill Gates complaining about the usability of some Windows features. It’s old — from 2003
https://www.techdirt.com/2008/06/25/you-thought-you-hated-wi...
In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
Apple has all but conquered the high end of the market, but that ad revenue... it's so tempting... soooo tempting... just one hit...
What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies
Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).
iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.
Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.
What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.
I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.
Or just none? I'm not doing anything special and the only ads I ever see are from some games.
Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.
I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.
You are right though. A duopoly is rarely a competitive market, especially for complex products (it can be for commodities)
Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.
Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)
Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.
Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.
Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.
Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.
Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.
The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.
Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.
The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.
The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.
"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.
It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.
I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.
I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.
This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.
It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension
Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...
https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...
Pantone and some sound partnership.
But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.
I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
"There's a high chance." https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117299954135808210
In other posts they've said they will be sold with GrapheneOS out of the box.
Even AOSP is head-and-shoulders better than iOS.
Likewise, no Android Auto
IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.
Cash is much better for privacy. The government, banking system, and countless intermediaries should not know how I spend my money.
So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance.
> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance
I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.
[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371
"Moving from cash to credit cards, PayPal, etc. is an ongoing privacy disaster."
You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
Pun intended?
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
Glad I'm a Linux user and admin.
https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update/issues/19#issu...
This was after Apple broke the trick to prevent Tahoe update nags.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.
This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
Edit: and rotation
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
Basically everyone is getting shafted.
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.
The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.
There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.
I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.
Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.
I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.
Hilarious. But bad UX.
For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.
But everything else I pretty much agree with you.
The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.
Yellow = yield (minimize)
Green = go (grow)
Makes sense to me.
OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!
They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.
I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.
It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).
> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.
It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.
> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.
We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.
> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great
The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.
> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder
The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.
> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.
> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.
But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.
The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.
And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.
That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.
Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.
What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?
It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.
> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.
Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.
If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…
I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.
But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that
They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.
[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html
[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck
According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.
It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.
It's mildly annoying to have to do the swipe-down-and-search to get to settings but it's not an app I use all that often.
This is a solved problem and you are not utilizing the solutions.
Apple you paid a lot of money to already.
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.
I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.
But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.
AFAIK you can click them away.
It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.
I hate ads, but mentioning other first party services feels very different than selling parts of the system UI like a billboard.
These service upsells should be dismissible but they seem fairly inoffensive. The App Store ads, on the other hand, are just atrocious
I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?
Obviously offering upgrades to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.
Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.
If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.
I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.
> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."
> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.
There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."
Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.
That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.
there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible
but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.
The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.
https://www.fulu.org/contact-us
That's the thing, though. Those modal offer popups have been in macOS and iOS for a really long time, and does cheapen the experience like Microsoft and Google products do.
And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.
And yeah, it drives me crazy. It's one more, wildly unnecessary, click.
Logic is one of the last tools keeping me tethered to MacOS. I've got 26 years invested in it, but the moment I open it up to record something and see an ad, it's over. Ardour and Bitwig will suffice, even if it means flushing tens of thousands of dollars of software down the toilet with it (the core suite of plugins I use).
I'm tired of unnecessary speed bumps in the creative process. It's why I no longer use a Roli Seaboard (what wildly awful software).
Apple continues down a course (addicted to ads, even their own) that I've seen few recover from.
1. Can't turn off Siri easily, turns itself back on.
2. Apple search not things it should obviously being able to find, just like Windows search.
3. Ads in the operating system like Windows 10+
But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.
(But, yeah, I'm reminded that I need to set up a Pi-Hole on the Starlink in the camper. I'm paying by the byte for those TechRadar ads.)
If that goes away I will have no reason to buy apple.
And you can dismiss them.
When you have willingly agreed to live your cyber life exclusively in the inside a golden jail, don't complain when the COs decide to collectively abuse you.
F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.
I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!
All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"
Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.
I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.
In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research
Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.
The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".
Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).
I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)
True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.
I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.
I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.
Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.
They somehow manage to threaten you that they'll delete your local photos...
Are you fucking kidding me
Options is all we need, and tools to customize them. And just like Blackberry or Nokia, they will learn the hard way