> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.
It's particularly bad when apps with legitimate time-sensitive functionality do this.
I denied the app the ability to send any notifications on principle, and now it's very annoying to have to check the app to see the driver status. It makes things worse for both me and them and I use it less as a result.
Perhaps they've fixed it since? I don't know because they've already burned my trust and they've done nothing to earn it back. Publicly acknowledging and apologizing for this would have been a way to start getting off my list of bad actors.
Even if they've made it possible to successfully turn those off deep in the menus now, whatever dreamed-up definition of "opted in" it's operating under is a tortured legalistic one that undermines the actual meaning and spirit of opting in.
And what’s worse is that the companies always seem to find a way to reset it to what they want quite frequently. One of their tricks is to reorganize permissions frequently so the ones that allow their spam to get through are always new.
As a web dev I see so many things that are lights-on-nobody-home about Meta. The Meta app on my phone generates numerous notifications, when I get one that says a game that looks really cool is 50% off, clicking on it doesn't send me to the landing page in the their app store, it sends me to the senseless home page of the app which seems to have the message "move on folks, nothing to see here"
The Instagram web application fails to load the first time I load it on my computer and I have to always reload. On either Facebook or Instagram I am always getting harassed by OnlyFans models that want me to engage with them... on the same platform where I engage with my sister-in-law.
When they say they are "careless people" I wonder if they are not just careless about sexual harassment and genocide but careless about making money because we're in a postcapitalist hell where Zuck could care less for making money for his shareholders but rather gets a squee from sitting behind Trump at his inauguration and hires people with $100M packages not because he wants them to work with him but because he doesn't want them to work with someone else.
1. your profile icon (bottom right) > hamburger menu (top right) > Notifications > Posts, stories, and comments > turn off ‘Posts suggested for you’ and ‘Notes’
2. on the same screen, set ‘First posts and stories’ to ‘From people I follow’
3. back out to Notifications > Live and reels > turn off ‘Recently uploaded reels’ and ‘Reels suggested for you’
This works for me, but if you’re still getting notifications you don’t want, you’ll have to figure out what category/type they fall under and turn that off.
I already had all but one of the settings you mentioned disabled, along with most of the others. I'll report back in a day or two.
It's a 600 MB app and you can log back in using only the iOS password manager. Reinstall it when you need to use it.
I let their support know, but they don't care. I guess as long as it still brings in more additional sales than it costs in lost users, it works for them.
This is something I like better on Android: As far as I remember, separate "notification channels" are mandatory there, and deactivating a given one is possible purely from the OS notification UI, without having to dig through inconsistent and hidden in-app options.
Pretty sure I've had marketing notifications on third party apps I couldn't disable without losing functionality, too. Separate notification channels might be mandatory in theory, but even if so, the Play Store is worse at policing that kind of thing in practice than Apple.
If not visible in the list, turn on ‘Show system apps’.
This is one of those cases where ultimately the app stores need to have a rule about it, and actively enforce it with hefty penalties for non-compliance.
This is on Android though, so perhaps an ecosystem difference?
Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
Last time I've checked, kdeconnect-ios was unable to read any third-party notifications, not to mention doing anything to them or modifying their text or appearance in any way.
Project readme still says "Notification syncing doesn't work because iOS applications can't access notifications of other apps" (https://github.com/KDE/kdeconnect-ios?tab=readme-ov-file#kno...) so I think it's still a thing.
Let the enshittified apps' ads interact with your AI agent and steal your fake "data" in the background without bothering the user.
Also important: It must be IMPOSSIBLE for any app to detect that its requests are being intercepted by your agent. (If they can tell, they'll refuse to work until you give them direct access.)
This is a real killer app for AI but you'll never get VC funding to build it.
But of course you need a rooted phone, and rooted phones can't run banking apps, tap-to-pay, Netflix, Pokemon Go, blah blah..
The notification "firewall" is probably not impossible to make. I use Pushbullet, it mirrors notifications to my computer (to the browser extension to be exact), and I can already dismiss notifications coming into my phone from the computer. It should be possible to make an app that intercepts all notifications, analyzes their contents and dismiss them if they're spam...
Revolut are really annoying for this. I'm sure there's a few spare days In their development cycle for someone to implement it if they wanted to, but instead they keep everything on the same channel which is 50% promo shit, because you don't want to miss that notification warning you about fraudulent activity on your card.
If many users receive a new kind of notification, using a new template, with low open rates, and uncorrelated with app activity, somebody at Apple should at least give it a 5-second glance and decide between "false positive" and "needs to be elevated"
It would only violate App Store guidelines if Apple forces itself to agree to, and be bound by them. I think it's arguable that they probably do not, and so they didn't violate the guidelines because they're not bound by them.
Apple could already do things with the App Store without needing to agree to something to get Apple to let Apple do App Store things.
Apple is not going to sue themselves for being in breach.
etc.
Just because there's e.g. a license agreement doesn't mean you need to agree to something, if you are somehow otherwise authorized to do the thing. E.g. fair use, or you have a pre-existing right or ownership, or whatever.
This is a common tech enthusiast fallacy: thinking that law is code. So there must be some "if app published, there must be a developer account, and if the developer account violates the rule the app must be removed". It just doesn't work that way.
Apple has contracts with third parties to allow them to distribute apps in Apple's App Store. That's it.
It's not the worst idea I've heard, tbh.
And it’s a pretty bad idea. It basically means that no apps that ship with an OS can be available in the store.
What does fair even mean here? Ensuring the advantages of vertical integration can’t be enjoyed by users?
The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.
I didn’t get the F1 ad though (at least not yet).
I have seen Apple abusing notifications in other areas to push their subscription services though, and it a problematic trend. It makes them look cheap and desperate.
That element of “well it’s different when we do it” is what’s so unclassy here. And, like… so weirdly un-self-aware.
And all for a coupon for a garden-variety movie?! The movie doesn’t have anything to do with Apple, other than being made on their dime. What a strange purpose for which to piss away your perch above the fray.
At least save this intrusion for when you’re pushing a magical new self-driving Apple Car or something!
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/report-apple-is-expl...
Have we not already agreed to this in one of the million TOS prompts that Apple shows us? sad
I've always wondered why apple feels entitled to do stuff like say "privacy is a right" while simultaneously collecting enormous amounts of data from your phone.
I think back to the dan ariely investigation into dishonestly showed that disclaimers (like license agreements/privacy statements) are pretty much the gateway to bad behavior. it's like carte blanche to do whatever they want.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.
humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really)
the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang
we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops.
we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)
Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience.
China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products. This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?
I think it will pass like every other empire/business: ruined by future generations who did not toil for it and who will trade it for short term gain.
But I think long-term thinking requires a unified people in a democracy, or a non-democratic system. Democracy in a divided society makes long-term stuff basically impossible when the next guy who comes in will just undo it to spite you. And long-term visions often come with short-term costs without anything yet to show for it, which can then be weaponized against you. Oh and the best trick of all is doing something with short term benefit and mid-term costs, and then blame the consequences of your own actions on the next guy in office. Excessive printing of money is an obvious and extremely common example of this.
I don't think this would work, they can't manipulate a sophisticated Western political system without actual sovereignty over the land. Western soft power is just that good.
If China had a playbook that could accomplish that, they would have used that instead for assimilating Hong Kong instead of what they ended up doing. They tried, but HK resisted Chinese influence HARD. So China stopped offering carrots and brought out the stick.
China is building soft power. We have Chinese funded teaching in British universities, lecturers moved from teaching a course because they upset Chinese students (who supported the regime), open apologists at places like Jesus College, Cambridge, agents building influence with MPs....
I agree Taiwan is unlikely to easily agree to be taken over by China, but that is because they know what living under Chinese rule will be like, not because of the soft power of the west.
Where the West's soft power essentially comes from in is in being the alternative to authoritarianism and it really doesn't have to be any more than that. The West will operate its own authoritarian regimes, like Puerto Rico, and Hawaii before it became a state, and the Phillipines, and these folks are perhaps the most oppressed of all. The West knows authoritarianism extremely well and is far better at the carrot / stick game of manipulating people.
When your carrots consist of patently self-serving deals to other autocrats at the expense of the public, the public eventually gets wise and puts pressure on the autocrat. The West can offer much more lucrative arrangements for all around, like that of building Taiwan's semiconductor industry. It's become a source of national pride for them and has created middle classes, a necessity for a modern political system.
All of which is great news for China, and a great victory for their ‘do nothing: win’ policy.
In general the trends of the past were largely a product of globalism, and globalism is dying. So I expect we'll enter more into a historical zones of influence global status quo. For instance anybody who doesn't think Chinese soft power is growing exponentially should visit basically anywhere in Asia now a days. A decade ago China had relatively minimal influence, now it's everywhere driven in large part by just absolutely massive numbers of Chinese tourists as well as expats. A rapidly expanding middle class in a country of 1.4 billion has an impact that's basically impossible to overstate.
Populism is notoriously brittle, and almost every European populist party has eventually fallen once they gained actual power, because it turns out governing is complicated and can’t be done effectively while maintaining that beautiful, simple, enticing narrative that brought you into power.
But the Chinese government is not populist in the same sense, often quite the contrary. Their legitimacy seems to be derived from the fact that they have achieved real results for their population, which means they will eventually hit a different road block.
This right here. The perverse incentives integral to public companies are at the core of so much that is wrong with the world.
Decoupling was coined by Americans and enthusiastically embraced by the CCP.
What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term. If you make an extra buck today, at the expense of losing user loyalty, that's not what any shareholder wants.
This could be a case of short term growth being rewarded inside the company. It could also be any number of other reasons.
Wall St growthbros do not draw these sorts of distinctions. If the focus on short-term growth ends up tanking a company, there will simply be another company to project its growth obssession on. It could be Apple services, or Peloton bikes or Subway sandwiches, they could not care less. Those companies aren't their customers; the investment houses, short sellers, market makers and pension funds are.
The empirically existing stock market does quite well long term. Apple itself is over half a century old, as are many other big companies.
We are in a forum were more than once I have seen people deriding mature companies as "mediocre" because of "moderate profits".
This idea that line must eternally go up and growth must be infinite is pervasive, no matter how destructive it is.
The result is this unholy abomination of a union of hustle-culture and rent-seeking.
iPhone sales aren’t plummeting at all:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...
That said, doing some searches for newer information (e.g., https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/) suggests that iPhone sales aren't plummeting but are instead rather stable. (Although I wonder how much of that is services attributed to iPhone as opposed to solely the sales revenue from iPhone, the source doesn't make that clear).
“Apple generated $390.8 billion revenue in 2024, 51% came from iPhone sales
Apple Services is the second largest division, responsible for 24% of revenue in 2024”
Back to iPhones, this [2] page shows their stats by units sold (about half way down). iPhone is essentially treading water if those data are correct (with a peak in 2015 overcome twice since, but by ~1% each time), but I strongly suspect that that's showing units shipped and not units sold, as iPhone sales declining has been universally reported.
I agree with you. Hand me downs aren’t coming as fast as they used to.
As it is, I bought my car new and is 20 years old in great condition. Partner … I mean, who wouldn’t want to trade in for a new model if it weren’t for the social concerns? (I kiiiid I kiiid)
I have bought two phones since 2010
Well, no, it shows:
2021 < 2023
2022 < 2021
2023 > 2021
2024 ??
We can see the bar for 2021 is longer than 2023!
We can see the table value for 2021 is > 2023!
Screenshots, for sales, from 2nd link, i.e. what we are told to look to see 2021 < 2023: https://imgur.com/a/CpGWbWM
(although, my comment makes a hash of the whole thing and says 2021 is both < and > than 2023. Sigh.)
(n.b. not trying to be aggressive, or disagree, or make a statement about the overall premise that sales are declining. Just mildly amused by the confusion in the thread)
(my $0.02 would be that we're seeing the same general stasis that was presumed after the iPhone 6 release, but really, we just need more data (2021 was COVID stimmy high))
(but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018" because this is what we were shown on the Pixel team at Google, and a little birdy told me that's how Apple thinks about it)
Note that what was being claimed was that “Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting”. Whether iPhone sales are growing, bounced around a bit, or have plateaued is irrelevant. It’s pretty clear they are not plummeting.
Note that I'm not saying that's true! I didn't say anything about any of that! :)
Growth is either from an expanding market or an expanding market share, since it’s not an expanding market that leaves the market share.
I would image there is some substitution, with iPhones lasting longer on average it becomes more cost effective to switch to iPhones so they capture more market share. But if the general market doesn’t expand then it’s a fairly safe assumption that the new converts are going to wait before upgrading meaning that a decrease in sales is already partially baked in.
My anecdotal datapoint is 4 iPhones in 16 years which makes them rather cheap on an annual basis.
Edit: I had assumed that parent was correct, but as the peer pointed out iPhone sales have declined
Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space. We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over.
iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude. Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc).
One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.
Smartphones were a big deal before the iPhone. People would talk about how they were addicted to checking email on their “crackberries.” But they were niche. You could see that they were going to be big, but they weren’t there yet. Then the iPhone catapulted smartphones from a popular niche to a ubiquitous product.
Before the iPhone, they did the same thing with portable music players. Afterwards, it was the same story for tables and smart watches, although not with the same degree of ubiquity. Arguably it was the same for PCs (“personal computers,” not IBM-compatible machines, of course) and GUIs, way back when.
What big upcoming thing would they do this with now? As you say, there really isn’t anything. Maybe VR/AR, but that isn’t even in the “popular niche” stage yet, the technology isn’t there yet, and it’s far from certain that it will ever be more than a tiny niche. Otherwise, what? Self-driving cars? That’s not a new market, that’s a product feature in an existing large, mature market. AI? That’s also looking like a feature rather than a new product category.
IoT/smarthome has been a niche/fad going nowhere since day 1.
Smart speakers are commodities.
They dabbled in an EV project, canned it.
They've dabbled in AR with the VisionPro but really it's too early, if it will ever work.
AI is software not hardware.
Apple smartphones/tablets/watches have essentially killed 10x more hardware categories than have come into existence since.
They sell a lot of headphones I guess.
The only consumer electronics I buy now outside Apple are basically higher end niche hobbyist stuff in for example music or photography. Nothing that would ever sell at the price levels ($200-1000) or volumes (billions) to move the needle for Apple.
If you are still using bluetooth headphones as they existed 10+ years ago, and haven't tried using apple headphones with an apple computer/phone, you are missing a massive quality of life upgrade in terms of basically never having to do the pairing dance again after your initial purchase.
The bigger problem with Bluetooth headphones is that the batteries are non-replaceable, so consumers are incentivized to throw them out every few years (just like smartphones).
Apple headphones will roam between all Apple devices that you own, and it pretty much "just works".
Of course, as soon as you step out of their ecosystem, not only you have to pair manually again, but it can only be paired to a single non-Apple device at a time.
There is absolutely no risk of Apple going under any time in the next few decades but the era of rapid progress is over.
The problem is it’s always a great 3rd or 4th device. Not sure there’s a high margin high volume demand for it.
Nothing wrong with that though. It is good to be a part of stable but solid market rather than trying to dominate it and fail.
A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off. Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus. Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
That's not what I'm suggesting. We already have those displays. What I'm saying is that once they have the technology to make a great outdoors display without too many compromises on the other parts, then they have an entirely new category of device to replace the old, and to sell hundreds of millions of units.
> Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus.
You're arguing like you live a limited life, which I'm sure is not the case, you're just arguing in that way in the quote above. People want to be outdoors much more than just to wait for the bus. And approximately 100% of the people who work with computers would prefer to do it in a well-lit environment. Offices and living rooms are currently constructed to shield from light, to let people see their computer or TV screens better.
Not to forget the people who actually work outdoors and need to check blueprints, take orders, or whatever. Bring your laptop to the park on a sunny day and try to use it. It won't be pleasant for your eyes even in the shadow.
> see the screen a little better
It's not a little, it's a lot. Try comparing your phone screen out in the sun with a sheet of paper with something written or printed. The paper is much brighter.
> Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
They are absolutely awful, and you need to compare in real life with better screens or paper to get a feel for it.
This is why I originally wrote that Apple is the right company to bring this kind of technology to the masses. They understand that the general public will buy products that are great to use, not products which are capable of being used if the user suffers all the time.
I often work outside in the middle latitudes when it's nice out, which usually means sunny. My laptop's display is fine in the shade. If I was desperate, I could use one of those third-party apps that enables HDR mode for all content to get it brighter than 100%, but so far I haven't needed it.
Which screens are you using outdoors? There's a pretty wide range of maximum brightness out there, so your experience will vary considerably depending on your specific hardware. A Dell Pro 16 laptop (picked arbitrarily from dell.com, I know nothing about it otherwise) display does 300 nits. My laptop does 1,000 nits, 1,600 with an HDR hack. An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
If you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkEa1ZttTxg
It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).
> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.
I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.
People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.
Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.
Better outdoor usability is demonstrably a selling point. That’s why newer iPhones have such a high max brightness. And people will certainly like even more. But they’re not going to pay a large amount for it, or accept any loss of indoor capability. It’s not going to be a new category of device, just the same stuff except better in very bright light.
But if they are able to make it, I'm all the happier. If Apple manages to make a fully daylight compatible device (whichever display technology), then they will have unlocked sales of hundreds of millions of devices. Because who doesn't want to get out of the cave?
And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining.
Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.
Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform.
Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26.
Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade.
So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base.
So they can sell to all of them.
The problem Google has is that they’re dependent on phone OEMs to release OS updates, but OEMs mostly don’t make money off software.
They ‘solved’ this by pushing a lot of security and OS features into Google Play Services, so they can update them independently of the OS. Today, you can get new apps and OS features even on older Android versions.
Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.
The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit.
Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).
What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
They support most devices for 5-7 years, and have a strong incentive to do so as there is a pipeline of used devices into developing markets and their branding and segmentation means their devices have strong resale value.
With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
You're not responding to the case I'm specifically talking about. As new major iOS or Android releases have features I could care less about, I primarily only care about critical security releases for the OS I have. Why is it thatI have to install a new OS just to get a updated version of Safari?
Whereas I seem to be able to download usable browsers on older Android phones (with older Android versions installed) from the play store?
These phones are not my primary phones, so I'm less concerned with security and more concerned about them turning into bricks of trash sooner rather than later. A phone that can stay usuable for longer without any os updates versus one that requires os updates to stay usuable should get some points in that category. And it's been my experience that battery life of older phones are negatively affected after os updates anyway, as they are not the targete phones for new OS.
My company had some ancient capital equipment that required windows 2000. We had a contract that supported them up until a few years ago. That contract costed a fortune, but made perfect sense for the use case. Nobody is going to pay to keep an iPhone 4 updated.
Note my comment is that you’re an outlier. That doesn’t mean that your needs are flawed, wrong or anything else. It’s just not consistent with the market’s need and represents an addressable market too small for Apple.
Sometimes companies do serve niche markets by rolling them together. Sonim, for example, made a fully waterproof Android phone that was rugged and marketed to public safety and construction customers. It also solved a problem for small customers like mine who had environments where traditional smartphones could trigger an explosion.
I don’t want a phone with design characteristics the lets it operate in a grain elevator. Likewise, I have no desire to operate a phone for many years, and the market, rightly or wrongly, agrees with me.
That's the bare minimum under the new EU Ecodesign Rules. Also for phones this is long, but for PCs/Notebooks this is rather short.
>With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
That completely misses the point that old Android Devices still get updated and recent Apps that work well, while Apple blocks their users from enjoying that. No more iOS Updates on Apple usually means no more App Installs/Updates after a short time
Sent from my iPhone 13 mini. It it breaks, I’ll replace it with a refurbished 13 mini or SE 3.
(My smartphone replacement budget is $1200.)
They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away.
Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.
Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
I use mine to design mines so people underground don't get killed - way more intensive than interior decorating.
> Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps
No, I deleted them all - other than youtube (premium, no adverts). I used to have them 10 years ago though so a 10 year old phone would run them.
> full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know)
I have a few games to pass the time in some cases, but a touchscreen is rubbish for proper gaming. Sadly some games I had (monkey island rings a bell) seem to have been removed.
> fitness apps
Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1, so I imagine that the supercomputer in my pocket can keep track of my heart-rate with the right sensor. I am fairly sure these were all the rage when covid hit 5 years ago so it's a fair bet they'll work now.
> connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example)
Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
> works with CarPlay/Android Auto
Yes, I had carplay in my 2016 car so any iphone since then will do carplay.
> has wireless charging capability
My 4 year old iphone does that, although I rarely use it. It came out 5 years ago.
> can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design
I have to admit I have never even considered doing that
> and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay?
Yes. It's face recognition so less convenient than the older phone it replaced which was a touch sensor and also did tap-to-pay, more like "double click, stare at phone, wait, then pay". Apple Pay came out over 10 years ago.
> Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Equivalent to what? A decade ago Apple were doing big advertising spreads about how good iphones were. I assume phones released 4 years later were at least as good.
Nothing on your list is a feature a phone from about 2016 didn't have, other than magnetic charging, and the 2020 era iphone 12 had that.
For example, when you write:
> Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
You're already showing me how you don't understand what people are buying or why they are buying it. You're referencing wired headphones as if anyone besides a tiny group of people wants wired headphones anymore. People are buying AirPods and AirPods Pro - they want them connected to their Apple Watch so they can go for a run with them, and they want new health features that continue to be released for such devices.
Reading these responses reminds me of the "inverse Reddit stock pics". If I were to take these responses seriously, and I don't because they are nonsense, Apple and others would be out of business tomorrow because any old Joe just wants to use their wired headphones and their 10 year old iPhone is JuST aS G00d. It's rubbish.
Here's a good example haha:
> Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1
Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone. Give me a break. Even so you yourself said you're not particularly fit. What makes you think you know the first thing about why people are buying new phones or new devices as it relates to fitness activities or apps?
You haven't really made a strong argument for why a user might upgrade specifically and immediately for those features, besides that they exist. Certainly the average person is upgrading over time as components break or fail, but why is it that you think the average person is still upgrading regularly for any of the things you listed?
Are you saying that modern airpods don't do bluetooth? And aren't supported on the iphone 11? People have used bluetooth headphones for 20 years. Why would apply regress?
> Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone.
The point is it's software, which will run just as fine on a supercomputer from 2 years ago as it will on today. What features does an iphone 15 (14? 16? whatever) have that an 11 doesn't have to allow these features?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxrv97djw9o
> The tech spec of every new handset camera is usually an improvement on the previous generation. But even this isn’t a guaranteed sales generator any more.
> “What is definitely happening is that people are holding on to their phones for longer. Back in 2013 there were 30 million phones sold annually,” adds Mr Wood. “This year it will be around 13.5 million.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/latest-smartphone-iphone-...
> Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”. Research polling 2,000 Britons revealed more than half are “bored” of trying to keep up-to-date with the latest tech. And three in four are no longer willing to pay a fortune to get it. As a result, almost a third intend to spend less on smartphones and other gadgets over the next two years.
If you're buying them in bulk on amazon, usb-c is still more expensive than lightning, but the vast majority of people tend to buy cables when they have either lost, forgotten, or broken their existing cables. Go to a shop at an airport or train station and they'll charge you £20 for a cable, and people but them.
The "apple tax" is irrelevant to the actual amount paid.
My headphones are USB-C and by far the most unreliable. The switch uses USB-C too, but that sits in its dock.
My laptop will use USB-C, but only for some combinations of cables and chargers.
If USB-C was as reliable and dependable as USB-A I wouldn't have a problem.
If you're talking about charging a phone, the usb-c ecosystem is literally never going to give you even a single instance of annoyance. If you're talking about lightning and laptop sized power delivery then, yes the cables need better labeling, but all of those cables are going to work for charging a phone.
How they managed to convert the simplicity and reliability of 20 years of USB-A into this mess is anyones guess.
Apple had enjoyed having world-leading crisis communications embodied within Steve and didn’t immediately know what to do when he was gone.
"You're holding it wrong" was about the worst case of "handling the fall out" that I can remember in computing history. Jobs was an absolute laughing stock after he said that.
I do wonder that with Job's bowing out when he did may have been the best thing that could happen to Apples. The visionary made way for the logistic guys to let the next 20 years or so boom.
Job's departed just as most technology fields were starting to move into a more mature state, not entirely there but definitely past peak innovation. This is why I think the Apple Watch is the only thing that I think Job's would have absolutely loved out of Apple over the last decade or so. Would have thought Apple TV+ is very cool but risky, and be disappointed in the lack of progress on iPhone and might have down right hated the Apple Vision due to the hardware limits (bulk).
Perhaps, but there probably would have been more thought over it than just shoving it onto everybody's phone. The problem, I think, is that Apple is *mostly* run by white men over 50 - a demographic that sees U2 as the pinnacle of the rock band. They probably don't even realize that rock bands aren't "cool" anymore. I remember when Apple Music was first announced and Eddy Cue spent far too long "demonstrating" his music library and it fell flat even to the press in his age range. Usually you're best off demonstrating with "timeless" music as music tastes are so personal.
I remember distinctly, because after trying patiently for months then years to get rid of it through official channels, I rage-quit iTunes when that whiny man’s voice started playing again the moment I connected my phone in a rental car. I still won’t touch Apple Music to this day.
For that matter, it still comes back from time to time all these years later:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/13kc29l/...
Apparently, since they have taken down their dedicated removal tool from 11 years ago [0], your remaining recourse is to contact Apple Support and persist through upsell attempts to paid support.
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
Was it common for lower-level employees to take part in C-suite meetings and arguments?
To directly address your question, the answer was yes in that if you developed a feature, a demo, or anything Steve wanted to see, you would end up in a forum with a bunch a various levels of employees.
Thinking of C suite meetings happening when Steve was around cracks me up. Steve was always on the move, making edicts, rejecting things, walking into offices, having lunch with people, etc. There was no Jira, Confluence, Agile or any of that. It was a fight to ship by an imposed date or die trying.
Rings a bell.
>Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/5/6.html by way of https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/05/23/apple-turnaround/
You are not supposed to find joy in work. Work is something that you do so you can afford to find joy elsewhere.
Why on earth would you discourage someone from finding joy in their work? It's possible.
For the same reason I discourage people believing in Santa Claus or in the Easter Bunny
Finding joy in their work is a cute idea. But it is cute and false, believing in it will lead to nothing but frustration and lower income.
Like, are you reading "find joy" as "find a job doing what you already love"? Those are different things.
This affectation of weary cynicism is so easy and popular. I'm over it.
Absolutely not.
Work with what you love, and you will never love anything again.
Try to find a job that is tolerable and devote your free time to things that make you happy - family, friends, hobbies, etc
What @surgical_fire is describing is the "minimum viable product" for a career. It's the thing that serves the basics on Maslow's Hierarchy.
What @hshshshshsh is describing is anything past that. We briefly exist sandwiched between two eternities -- shouldn't we care about the quality of our time during the thing that takes up the largest quantity of our time?
The problem is that, the issue that @hshshshshsh is pointing out is precisely what makes the minimum @surgical_fire is describing damn near impossible to find.
Because no one gives a shit about users, values, mission, etc, the company suffers and turns into a shit-show, incentivizing people to become more selfish so that they don't get sucked into the vortex of shit.
In order to reach the minimum of a "tolerable" job that doesn't suck up all your free time or make your time there a living hell, the company _must_ engage with at least some of what @hshshshshsh is describing.
This requires some amount of good faith from the majority involved. This is a tricky and fragile thing. It's easy to lose. And thus the cycle begins anew.
Ultimately, we need more people thinking like @hshshshshsh so that we can get what @surgical_fire is describing.
Otherwise you get generic slop, eventually.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
Tacky things under Jobs were failed experiments. Modern Apple doesn't believe in either experiments or failed experiments.
Apple Vision Pro qualifies here.
Now Apple is a multi trillion dollar company and they can’t take as much risk.
Historically Apple refines something common that already exists and makes it cool. The last big thing they made cool was the smartphone, followed by the AirPod pros. I think AirPods really pushed headphones ahead. Do you remember how bad wireless headphones used to be?
So I guess I want that sort of Apple experience. If Apple turned ordinary hardware experiences into premium, that would be nice. AR googles are not ordinary experiences. Smartphones were.
That’s just my opinion though.
As for vision pro though and I guess even to a little extent the car exploration, it's sort of "safe" and derivative conceptually.
Steve's experiments were often seemingly directly at odds with profitability. Like, one day he may have looked at the extensive lineup with the "Pro Max" etc, and made the call to cut back down to one iPhone model. Or he would, you know, do something ridiculous like make the next Imac's screen round or something.
It's decisions like that which primarily profit driven mega corporations just can't do.
They are either turbo sensible or doing silly things like Titan/Vision.
And this has been the only design style they have been going for for 15 years at least: it's now thinner. There are almost no other considerations.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
Here’s him announcing and talking about ads in WWDC: https://youtu.be/eY3BZzzLaaM?si=Dttc5eJJ1B7Zf3sB
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
He also "hated" the small tablets Samsung were making, saying in a keynote that you'd have to file your finger down to use it. He said this knowing full well Apple were launching the iPad Mini in 12 months' time.
I really hope one day Jobs' marketer-speak soundbites stop being repeated like like biblical pronouncements. The App Store, Apple News, Stocks and other properties are filled with hideous Google-like ads today, and Jobs likely wouldn't bat an eye, because they brought in money.
Thats why the F1 wallet add is such a bad move. It’s disrespectful and intrusive.
iAD was supposed to be about innovative, informative, well designed high quality adverts. It never really worked out though.
Lighting doesnt strike twice imho.
Sorry, having seen the sappy photo of Ive & Altman I cannot trust his taste.
https://in.mashable.com/tech/94502/sam-altman-taps-worlds-gr...
Truth is Apple was always like that, but Apple in particular has a lot of fans willing to play the white knight in its name.
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.
Whether they'll do anything about it is a different question.
The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…
What are you basing this on, the total number of iPhones sold since 2007? If so, it doesn't account for the users that have bought multiple iPhones.
To most of us, the appeal of Apple has always been primarily that it does what it does well.
I don't think Apple themselves thinks their appeal depends on exclusivity, but rather on a premium experience.
I much prefer being able to use third-party displays and not having to get rid of perfectly good screens when getting a new computer.
I don’t know what I’ll do when I need a new personal machine.
Do you hear yourself?
Yes
Ok you haven’t but what about Ive?
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
With Jobs gone, it still has a taste but it someone else’s taste.
That said, I think some people have developed their own original taste but some people’s tastes are just an amalgamation of the people around them.
Without the huge hold of the cloud and business markets Microsoft enjoys they only have hardware.
And besides their excellent laptops you can forget of the existence of any other of their products.
If the person who came up with this reads this site, I hope they see this comment and think about how screwed the industry would be if everyone acted the way they did.
There's some intersection point between who "owns" the wallet and who is coming up with ways to generate marketing revenue.
Whoever lives at that intersection point is the real shot caller here aren't they?
Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas, that just creates a culture of not thinking outside the box. But the person who is filtering those ideas is the critical lynch pin.
> Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas,
If an idea is that bad, at the very least they should be transfered into a role that doesn't involve coming up with good ideas, since obviously that is outside of their skill set. And what's the argument for not firing the chain of people who approved it? Their job was to stop bad ideas and they catastrophically failed.
Proposing one bad idea is not unusual for people whose job is idea-driven. When ideas are the primary currency of your occupation, you'll necessarily generate some losers. But in a company of Apple's size, that's why you rely on colleagues and - critically - a more robust approval process to move from idea to deliverable.
I hate your idea of firing (from org. or role) the idea person based on one bad idea. I don't hate the idea of firing (from org. or role) the leaders accountable for getting this idea into the world.
Social norms exist outside of criminal law, and a single extremely poor decision is reason enough for people to lose their freedom.
Why shouldn’t it be possible for people to lose their jobs?
This is a strawman argument that seems made in bad faith, but I'll bite anyway: I am not saying that no single bad idea or mistake should result in the loss of a job. I am saying that most of the time such a response would be an extreme reaction, especially when directed at the lower-level source of the ideas vs. the more senior accountable parties who are paid to know better.
Magnitude matters, as does accountability. Creating this world of extremes where one mistake of poor idea leads to termination is a pretty quick way to a toxic and non-productive work environment. Enact accountability where it sits, not across the entire chain.
The parent seems to be of the mind that it's never a viable option for someone to lose their jobs for something; which I find an extreme position in itself.
I'm not sure how this context is lost, as precisely this point is what I'm getting at. I'm not jumping to extremes as some imply (including you), I'm saying it should be on the table for the most hopeless egregious offences.
Learning from our mistakes is one thing, slip ups happen after all, but I’m just drawing a comparison to “a single misjudgement”.
If you don't know societies values (stealing is wrong) or a companies values (tarnishing the brand by looking cheap and desperate) the outcome should probably be the same: expulsion or exclusion.
Also, don’t go to the most extreme negative interpretation of what someone says, it’s against guidelines.
Why exactly besides the fact that you like extreme solutions?
Either you’re suggesting jail is too punitive a punishment or that being fired should never be a viable option.
I’m not saying we should jump to extremes, I’m saying that the option should be on the table if you violate the core principles of the company, especially in a way that causes loss of consumer trust.
Whats the difference between defrauding Ford out of $200M and causing $200M in damages because I decided that every new Ford will include the word “I solemnly swear I will shit on the American flag when requested”?
In essence, in either case I am putting my own needs above the needs of the company and above the needs of the consumer - in a way that undermines future sales for the company too.
The first is something that might have gone better in better circumstances, so it’s a learning opportunity. The second shows you either don’t understand the company and decided to carry on despite that, or you just don’t care about the company, but either way it reflects poorly enough on an individual that a firing should be on the table.
No, you fire people for generating ideas that are shady and against your own policies.
Some ideas are so bad they indicate that you aren’t aligned with the goals of the company
This looks like a group PM level decision. Bluntly, at that level we get paid enough to exercise good judgement.
Tim Cook did this, and anyone that can't put the blame on him is lying to themselves.
It seemed like Jobs used the products and was trying to make stuff that he would want to use. Cook seems like he doesn’t use any of these products, and is willing to sacrifice the user experience to try and make a few extra bucks.
It seems time for some new blood leading Apple. A product person who can get the company back to the core of trying to make insanely great products that people want to use, without compromise.
“Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by profit motives.”
> I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.
This is not the fault of ONE low level worker and there is no reason to punish them and then walk away like you've accomplished /anything/ meaningful in the long term.
These are precisely the types of public cases that should be brought against them. It would lend a lot of aid to the anti trust efforts against them as well. They clearly privilege themselves and see the devices and app store as their asset, not something they maintain on behalf of customers and developers.
Will there actually be any short, mediumm, or long term consequences for Apple? What real, tangible trust has Apple lost that could lead to meaningful harm to them?
The only thing I can come up with is people who hold Apple to some kind of high-minded ideal, that they constantly run foul of for other reasons already.
Google is being forced to take Google Flights links out of Search results, for instance.
People here, discussing it, a) demonstrate that they find the act to represent a breach of trust, and b) spread that understanding and opinion among those who read it.
That's not, in itself, a direct consequence for Apple, but it is something they need to be, and I genuinely believe are, worried about, because losing trust in them is precisely the kind of thing that will get people to stop buying their products. This is especially true given the way they've positioned themselves as a more trustworthy actor in the privacy field.
Windows is the perfect example against the claim that Apple should be comfortable to abuse their users. Windows marketshare has been steadily dropping for the last 15 years. People are tired of the abuse, and slowly but surely leaving the platform. We now have people like PewDiePie making videos about switching to Arch Linux and self hosting, large companies offering employees a choice of Windows or Mac… things that would have sounded extremely unlikely 10+ years ago.
I’m pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, having been in it since 2003. I could transition out of it within a week if I had to. There are some things I’d miss, for sure, but I’d live.
Everyone with the power like Apple does
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.
Here’s a little game of insider Apple baseball:
1) why do you think the chief of design isn’t on this page? https://www.apple.com/leadership/
2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?
Then Cook took over but still Jonathan Ive stayed as head of design until 2019.
Ive was replaced by Evans Hankey and Alan Dye who were under Jeff Williams, the Chief Operating Officer.
Talk about a downgrade!
To keep the guessing game going: what percent of Apple is owned by institutional investors?
Yes it is
The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.
From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.
(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)
I agree with this.
There was a (brief) period when website advertisements were simple, first party hosted image files. IIRC, the first text ads on metafilter (2001 ?) were just strings in the same HTML file.
You may like or dislike these things but they were not a privacy concern.
Was this a targeted ad? Apple doesn't openly attack Ads - they are actively hostile to privacy invasive technology, which I don't think this runs foul of.
The problem isn't that Apple has ads, it's that Apple pushed an ad through Wallet. And in the Settings app. And in all the other untasteful places they spam with these ads.
What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.
What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.
Here is another angle. If Apple could successfully destroy the In App Ads industry, which they earn nothing from, and force those value into subscription, who will benefit most? Remember Apple tried iAds and earn a percentage of it but failed.
People should at least read PG's Submarine [1] to understand how modern PR and media works. Once you have that understanding the lens of reading anything about Apple becomes a little different.
Could you provide specific examples? It is possible that I’m misremembering, but in that case you should be able to point me to those specific campaigns.
Everything else in your comment has nothing to do with my point, though.
Soon (2028?) "Yes, we know Apple advertises to us and backdoors their services for the government. But *at least* my personal data isn't being sold, without Apple's privacy promise I would be helpless."Your comment is absurd. I criticise Tim Cook all the time.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Try to understand what people are saying without injecting your own preconceived notions and maybe you won’t get as depressed. Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.
> Making a correction about a point is not the same as defending it.
That is called astroturfing, and it is a deliberate bad-faith discussion tactic. If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it. This is exactly the subliminal shit that depresses me, this site is whipped by Apple and will do anything except admit it.
No, no they are not. That is so simple to disprove.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44414508
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44411237
Again, you’re only seeing what you want to see. Your opinion on Apple isn’t special or rare, it’s shared by tons of people on HN.
> If you genuinely don't think their comment is relevant to your point, then there would be no reason to write a reply to it.
So someone misunderstands or mischaracterises your point, and in your mind you should never correct and clarify the misconception, because doing so is bad faith? I mean, you do that if you want to, but that’s not what astroturfing is.
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
Long-time iOS users like to dunk on Android but even Android doesn't do this. All these things are notifications on Android, so you could deal with them on your own time.
I wish the fact that every company enshittifies in the end would wake us all up to the fact that rampant unregulated capitalism just doesn't work before it's too late to make any changes at all.
- company started in garage
- makes first sales
- gets popular
- gets investors
- becomes huge, changing the world of computing
- enshittifies
- gets replaced by the next company that was started in a garage somewhere
A good system is not one that preserves Apple or IBM or Xerox.
A good system is one that allows these companies to come and go, because in the end we want the consumer to keep winning.
Apple enshittifying is bad for everyone in the short term, but it opens the door for whatever comes next.
Half the news stories about Apple, Google, etc are them being fined or being forced to change their business practices due to regulations. These companies employ hundreds if not thousands of people to make sure they are following thousands and thousands of regulations.
What capitalistic mechanism allows a garage startup to compete with a company worth $3,000,000,000,000 ?
Surely you've seen this in Silicon Valley: the infamous way Google (or whoever) kills your startup by releasing your product for free, waiting for you to die, and then killing the product, just to ensure there's no competition in a field they may want to one day enter.
Or they just buy you. Great for the founder! Terrible for the consumer.
The modern tech company is more akin to Standard Oil, but possibly even more powerful and all encompassing considering Google for example can determine what is true and false for a given population. Standard Oil was only able to be toppled by a State.
So again, what capitalist mechanism exists to allow a garage startup to knock over apple or Google? I completely agree with you that Google is enshittifying - my disagreement is that anything will happen about that unless a State intervenes.
The less regulation and tax you have, the quicker the wheel of innovation above turns.
OTOH, there are some cheap and easy regulations with a large societal return, like pollution regs. These low-hanging fruit should be picked, as long as the fruit-pickers don’t redirect the whole economy towards ever-taller fruit-picking ladders.
I think we're fixating too much on purity of the word "unregulated." If you'd like to offer a different one I'm open to it - to me, the closest example of "regulated capitalism" is the PRC's State Capitalism, however it's a poor example given the atrocious working conditions there and the massive wealth inequality.
"Unregulated" to me doesn't mean "literally no regulations." To me it means, the owners of Capital have a very large amount of power, to the point that every regulation on them is an uphill, nigh-unwinnable battle. See: pushes for 30 hour work weeks in Europe. Or, see: pushes for socialized healthcare in the USA. I think we can both agree that the USA will never have socialized healthcare so long as the health insurance companies wield so much power and influence!
I think Apple wouldn‘t exist without cheap labor in authoritarian countries but that‘s a prerequisite for capitalism
I don't think Apple could have existed as it did under Jobs in any other system.
The same Apple that tried to convince everyone they were holding their phones incorrectly resulting in Antennagate?
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
They do the same on my windows computer, ever time I open edge and every time I open a new tab !
This is the kind of behavior I wouldn’t even tolerate in real life, they are really taking us for sheeps.
Yet macos' polish and elegance just hide different issues, in particular the utter lack of flexibility (Apple's way or the highway) and expecting to solve most issues by throwing money at it (want 3D perfs ? just buy another computer)
I personally couldn't understand why I'd keep paying for both a macbook and an ipad just to have a "real" computer and a touch screen. Microsoft made the Surface Pro a decade ago now.
But, as already mentioned in the original article, the wallet is an especially sensitive area.
https://support.google.com/photos/thread/162190/how-to-turn-...
Did it send a push notification or bother the user? Got a screenshot or reference, since a quick google doesn't uncover it?
The article links to https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/26/apple-wallet-se...
Which links to these examples:
https://x.com/ParkerOrtolani/status/1937551035825807545
https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWallet/comments/1ljbjrs/how_do...
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/24/apple-wallet-notificati...
(and actually a few more too)
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
I just checked, and I can delete it from my library the same way I can delete any other album.
That doesn’t sound easily removed to me.
If your iTunes was filled with songs, it got lost in the noise. This probably describes all of the Apple employees who thought it was a good idea.
If your iTunes was empty, U2 became that annoying song that played by default when you connected your phone to your car for any reason or other systems that played music by default. For years I can remember this happening to people in random situations and then everyone around would groan.
I was in an older man’s car last year. It started playing the album. He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.
A decade later that album is still annoying people. Bluetooth triggered play or something like that and the only music on the old iPhone started playing.
And the chief complaint is that there is an album in the library.
No, in this case the play command was coming from the attached device. Apple’s product was complying with the command in the only way it could, by playing the songs in the library.
So the album didn’t cause the problem but it revealed it.
But yes, it's still the insult on top of the injury.
I have this same problem but it plays my wedding playlist from nearly 20 years ago. Some terribly annoying song I no longer like. I assume it’s too much work to delete my library and so I just deal with the annoyance.
Apple did give away free videos on the old Mac OS install cds like widows did. I think to show off quick time and that your computer can play videos (back when that was newish). They didn’t install onto you hard drive..
I use Spotify in the car, and have for years. A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of saying, "Hey, Siri, play liked songs."
"OK, playing Apple Music."
Oh, well, yet another spark of genius from the tire fire that is Siri. Whatever. I switched back to Spotify manually and went on with my day.
Since then, every time I get in the car it starts playing tracks on Apple Music. No matter how many times I relaunch Spotify, even after force-closing the Apple Music app on the phone itself, Apple Music keeps coming back.
If there is a way to get it to properly resume the playback state at shutdown time, I'm not smart enough to find it. 100% pure unadulterated enshittification... courtesy of Apple, the company with "taste."
Lol I had completely forgotten about that, thanks for reminding me. Going to have to find a copy with that lovely MPEG blocky quality.
Edit - it wasn't, my bad, see below.
https://www.rnz.de/cms_media/module_img/176/88193_1_detailxs...
This happened in 2014 and Jobs passed in 2011.
The updates Microsoft has been making to add stuff the Windows lockscreen and start menu also seem like they should be at the least legally questionable.
And of course Google practically invented these things.
I feel like we need a CANT SPAM act.
From the Wallet app, tap on "…" at the top right, then "notifications".
They burned a lot of goodwill over a low conversion campaign. It reminds me of the U2 album that they snuck onto everyone’s phones, but even tackier .
I'm sad they make the only decent laptop out there, for everything else I'm glad to be out their crap wallet garden.
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?
And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.
The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
I just want to highlight this because Hacker News can be incredibly dismissive about this.
Apple’s focus on privacy is a competitive advantage. Consumers value it, and Apple’s competitors have business models that undermine it.
Even if you think Tim Cook is the literal devil and Apple will do absolutely anything for a buck, Apple’s focus on privacy is still relevant.
Privacy is valuable to Apple. It’s a wedge they can use against their competitors. Google doesn’t make their fortune selling hardware, they make it selling ads. Privacy is something that gets in the way of Google’s profits.
Because Apple are in this position, it’s profitable to them to champion privacy. It’s something they can do that’s valuable to customers that their competitors are at a disadvantage with.
You don’t have to be a fan of Apple, and you don’t have to trust Apple. All you have to do is believe they want to make money. Being pro-privacy is profitable to Apple, and so they act accordingly.
A great example of this is that they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken. An actual privacy-centric product, this would be a major problem. Consider Signal.
Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
There is no giant moat between Apple and privacy violation. They'll do it whenever they feel like it, and Apple customers are very forgiving.
It’s not completely broken. For average users, erring on the side of being able to restore from backup is the best choice. For people who need more security, that’s what Advanced Data Protection is for. You have the choice of which option suits you best; I think the default is appropriate for typical users.
> Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
What happened was they put a huge amount of effort into building a system that goes as far as it possibly can to implement CSAM detection that could work on E2E encrypted photo libraries while maintaining as much privacy as possible.
The design of the feature demonstrates they put a lot of effort into privacy – competitors just scan everything that’s uploaded to them, while Apple went above and beyond to do something a lot more difficult. The entire point of it was to detect without Apple having to have access to your photo library. There’s no point to design a system like that if they weren’t prioritising privacy – they could just scan on the server like everybody else if privacy isn’t a priority.
And what happened – everybody freaked out anyway, so they cancelled the feature. It’s an example that supports my point. Apple respond to incentives.
Personally, I wish they hadn’t cancelled the feature. Virtually everybody complaining about it didn’t understand how it worked and thought it worked in a completely different way.
The purpose of end-to-end encryption is that the messages cannot be read even by Apple. This is a feature that they advertise in their webpage about iMessage security.
All I'm saying is that a bunch of people believe that iMessage supports end-to-end encryption and at the same time know that their messages are encrypted by a key that Apple holds and can decrypt them with via iCloud backup.
That's quite literally marketing a privacy-centric product and having the reality (for the vast majority of users using the defaults) be substantially different than what was promised.
To put it even more starkly, Apple advertises that they can't read your messages, and yet they can.
- The right choice for the average user is to prefer recoverable backups.
- Recoverable backups undermine E2E encryption.
- Apple provides Advanced Data Protection which disables a bunch of things like recoverable iCloud backups in favour of more secure measures.
Apple deciding that ADP is not appropriate for the average user does not mean that “their promises are purely marketing”. They implemented it. It’s real. You can switch ADP on at any time. It’s just not the default, for good reason.
But the truth is, nobody really cares about privacy, least of all, users. Nobody ever bought an iPhone because of "privacy"; people buy iPhones because they work, and because they seem cool. Everyone's happy to hand over data to any service.
Facebook has three billion users.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what I was saying. I wasn’t arguing that Apple “really cares” about privacy; quite the opposite – I was arguing that it doesn’t matter if Apple “really cares”, what matters is that they are financially and strategically incentivised to be pro-privacy.
Linux is not Apple’s competitor. Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.
Yeah, that's the sad thing. And on mobile their only competitor is Google... so they don't have to be really good at privacy.
And there is one! If you don’t recognize that you yourself are subject to some sort of distortion field.
have you used the app store in the last few years?
I search for my bank and the first results are a load of scammy crypto app ads
then my actual bank app is at result number 3
this is the sort of behaviour I would have expected from Google
Amazon used to sell us items, now ad sales are a big part of their storefront's revenue. Cable used to not have ads.
If you aren't paying, you are the product doesn't also imply that if you paying you are definitely not the product. To the modern exec, everything and everyone is the product. I an surprised that gig economy apps aren't also selling the eyeballs of their workers, making them watch ads to work.
and by selling ads, seriously, just open their app store.
> And because it has positioned itself
And they can continue that while simultaneously doing the opposite. There is no law against inconsistent behavior
> Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
Yes, of course, that's easy to find via a 5 sec google search
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/12/24128640/microsoft-window...
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23712440/gmail-ads-more-an...
For me, such a notification is an unwanted intrusion, and it is not compatible with privacy.
Lack of openness means lack of privacy. If we can't install apps on the side that have proper adblock filtering, then all the promises in the world are hollow.
A closed system that prioritizes privacy will result in more users benefiting from greater privacy overall, even if it does give the platform more control than is ideal. And that's the issue with the wallet ads: Apple makes users more secure on average, but it depends on user trust, which it just betrayed.
Those who can take advantage of total control are a minority, and they are not really the people Apple cares about.
Sensible defaults and warnings about changing them is all you need to put any argument of 'bad for privacy' down.
"Privacy. That’s Apple.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."
So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.
It's wild to me they would claim privacy as some human right while making the only computer in the world you can't actually control without their involvement.
"Apple does have a traditional advertising business, and it does appear to be growing: The folks at Business Insider's sister company EMarketer think it will hit $6.3 billion this year, up from $5.4 billion last year.
And that's not nothing. For context: That's more than the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter generated in 2021, its last full year before Elon Musk bought the company; it's also more than the $4.6 billion Snap generated in 2023."
The article goes on to specify it's only 6% of Apple revenue. But 20% comes from Google and looking at how the antitrust trials are going, that source may soon dry up. The logical conclusion is Apple will aggressively move to make up for the loss by exploiting their captive audience.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-sea...
This is coming from a guy who generally fawned over every new iterative release as if it was revelatory for 20 years.
I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
And I'm not sure what you mean about ecosystems either, yes you do need a Google account to download apps from the Play store, but you also need an Apple account to use the Apple store as far as I know.
In my experience it's easier to create a second Google account than a second Apple account.
Now I'm not representative of most users, like all HN users probably. But at home, apart from my M1 Mac (running Linux because I hate macOS) my other machines are Intel n100-based. They work fine.
Nobody outside of Apple even has that as a vision. Microsoft is so bad at building consumer products it's unbelievable. Google is struggling to build compiling phones with its own software - I doubt they can execute on other device types. Valve did a relatively small investment in this ecosystem and brought it forward light years in the gaming space.
Phones are even worse. You basically stuck on iOS and Android and I honestly see no situation where picking Android wouldn't be worse. You have a better selection of phone, and you could run /e/OS, Calyx, or something else, but that's just a hassle. I'm not a big fan of the direction iOS is developing, it tried to do way to much and the UI has become a mess.
In the event that I have to deprecate my current Android, I might have a go at installing Graphene and trying it out in various countries.
Maybe I'm alone, but one of the few reasons I care about technology is to not treat it like politics or fairy magic.
even if it were the best processor to ever exist, it's not something that we can not live without.
> Linux is a part time job
It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.
I daily drove fedora last summer for a few months and it was a joke on how unstable it was. Slack would crash when screen sharing, likewise for chrome/gmeet, camera corruption bugs. Just two days ago I was teasing a coworker on a daily that we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself. Chrome would randomly stop rendering all windows when watching YouToube in a separate window. KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable but had issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland (Plasma 6 supported this). Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs and trying stuff out, breaking my audio several times in the process. My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD. And this is all on a well supported desktop machine. Laptop and power management was even worse last time I tried it. Hell I never had a PC laptop that managed sleep state reliably and didn't cook the battery in the backpack randomly.
I just don't have these kinds of issues with MacOS. The processor/laptops are just best on the market and it just works, support is amazing. It is hard to justify dealing with Linux desktop and PC hardware even at a price premium, but these days Apple devices are even price competitive compared to similar windows/linux machines.
There is only one justification that I need: Apple wants me in a golden cage, and I don't want to lose my freedom at any cost. No matter how much cheaper it can get, not matter how much "better" than the competition it is, it is not worth the price. I do not exchange my freedom for convenience, status or some materialistic joy. It's as simple as that.
All your arguments against Linux are at best circumstantial and at worst bogus. Of course it is not perfect. Of course it has limitations. But it's undeniable that the gap between FOSS and Windows/Apple is getting narrower and narrower, despite the FOSS side getting a minuscule fraction of the resources available to trillion dollar corporations.
And the really fucked up part is that You are the one claiming to "hate" Apple, yet you keep buying their products and making their market dominance ever stronger.
---
Just to address your "claims":
> we can spot a linux user by how long it takes him to unmute himself
Never had any issues of that sort, whether I was using Google Meet, Slack, Zoom or anything else.
> KDE plasma would get messed up very frequently. Gnome was more stable
I've been using XFCE since 2010 (When Ubuntu went with Unity). It is not fancy and does everything I need.
> issues with fractional scaling X11 apps on Wayland.
It has been working fine on my Desktop and my Framework laptop for some good 3 years, when I actually bothered to look. Before that, I'd just go by through customization of window zoom levels (browser) and font-size (emacs, terminal, GTK apps).
> My LG C4 cannot be used at 4k/120Hz because you cant get HDMI 2.1 on Linux/AMD
hum, too bad? How significantly was your quality of life affected by this? Curiously, I also use an LG monitor with AMD running at 4k/60Hz, and the fact that I am "missing out" on something here does not even cross my mind.
> Installing a DAW took days of reading audio routing docs
Did you get it working? Was the software FOSS? Can you share your findings back with the developers and help them improve their product, or are you going to keep rationalizing the abusive relationship you're in because "at least things just work, most of the time".
That single-handedly unlocked a huge cohort of boomers and other tech laypeople that had never tried Spotify or any other music streaming platform before.
It was smart and also a huge abuse of market power. Apple Music would have bombed without it. The only reason they didn't get in deep shit for it was that Apple doesn't have nearly the market capture in the EU that they have in the US, and in that time period the US didn't do antitrust against tech companies.
Deceptive app naming has nothing on that.
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
No, but you should be always ready to jump the ship, always research reasonably good alternatives and never go deep in their walled garden. Ideally, you could even support the efforts to bring the freedom with your money or time, like GNU/Linux phones.
If I wanted Ad spam I would've used Google.
That shipped sailed many years back. Apple runs a highly successful ad network. It is just that most people are slowly starting to realize the true colors of the company.
I am not in anyway agreeing with the tracking of people's activities and purchases, but if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.
Any choice of wallet app, or ecosystem (ie iOS or Android) will not make any difference.
[citation needed]
For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44368854
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44371872
> Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
I remember getting a commercial for Ed Sheeran's new song for Apple's new F1 Movie which I can listen to on Apple Music and just ask Siri to play it and wanting to throw the remote at the TV. Apple just really wants to watch baseball with me. I prefer my crappy local OTT ads.
Apple has lost their taste and lost their respect for users.
I miss the world when Apple had a point of view and vision that served to move things forward, not just stocks/revenue up.
Spot on. Look at it this way: would SJ have allowed this to happen? Absolutely not. And if it somehow had happened while he were still there, he would've unquestionably (and quickly) fired the responsible parties.
There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s
https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/p147sn/apps_like_yelp_...
What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?
"And ads in the operating system? YUCK."
I spend an enormous amount of money on Apple products, and increasingly they lead to frustration and anger at the thoughtlessness and plain shittiness of them. I’m really wondering why I bother. They clearly don’t have my interests in mind.
Android provides a "notification categories" setting where user can trun some type of notifications on and other off.
Most apps I use fall into two or three buckets --
1. There is just one "default" notifications category ... so it is all or nothing.
2. There are a few categories named very vaguely with no way to actually discern what is useful and what is junk, and they also use them inconsistency.
3. There are tons and tons of notifications categories - list keeps changing frequently - so There is no way you can set and forget. So whatever you may do, ads still sneak through.
Where/how can we start pushing back on this irresponsible behaviour and shame these billion dollar brands for abusing customers and treating us like fools.
If someone has already given this form of abuse a name and a prominent online post -- maybe we could make it more popular and raise awareness.
I increasingly use wallet for everything - multiple credit cards, show tickets, transit tickets.
Is there an alternative? Android?
That said, both Apple and Google are shit companies that should jot be trusted with this. I with there was a third option
Also, please not FB. I have to be careful with what I wish sometimes.
This is pure nonsense. From someone with the experience to know better. It's amazing to me that people could say this out loud.
> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private.
The "perception of privacy" is _all you have_. You don't even have access to the technical details!
> I’m 99.9 percent certain this F1 ad was just blasted out to zillions of Wallet users indiscriminately
Stop making excuses for the trillion dollar gorilla in the room with you. You don't understand it. You've anthropomorphized it to a point of pathos. It's going to rip your arms off. It's just a matter of time.
- iPad is a confusing array of what that device is for. Is it for professional creators? Or consumers? Is it a PC? Or is it a mobile device? For the first time since its inception, it got a window manager at WWDC25. And yet, no support for any other apps outside of the App Store (EU excepted). Not a single creative professional uses it in the workplace. Not a single engineer uses it for development. And yet, a 11 iPad Pro with the trackpad+keyboard is more expensive and less capable than an M1 Macbook
- iPhone: They are absolutely scared to change anything on here because the current culture at Apple is one of "do not change what brings us the most profits". Year over year small improvements, and rising phone costs. OS 26 brought about... a confusing design change. And while some analysts are fooled into thinking that this is preparation for their VR glasses, and even if that was remotely true (it's not) the analysts forgot that half transparent displays still obscure your vision. So that's not it.
- Developer experience. There was recently a post on Hacker News about how the developer exhausted every avenue and was left with OS level behavior that only Apple could change or fix. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901619 The comments ripped Apple apart. And you know what the response was? Apple finally helped them. But look at the second blog post where the developer posted it's resolved now. Not a single detail. They signed NDAs, and the post was essentially "we can't give any details because secrecy, but Apple helped us. They're great!". I can guarantee you 100% Apple forced their hand, and in fact Phil Schiller has said publicly that they are not willing to help you if you "cry to the press".
Xcode reviews on the Mac App Store are scathing. Swift? Chris Lattner left months after Apple released Swift. And at the time it seemed like he just wanted to focus on something else. The details of why he left at the time was very hidden and hush hush. And guess what? It's come out in the Swift forums. https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr...
Horrible.
Performative nonsense. Their events are full of carefully chosen words and phrases that showcase a dead culture. One where you can't have any creativity beyond the new presenters and their fashion. Awkward corporate events that aren't fun anymore to watch as they release mundane features like "shake your mouse to make the cursor bigger!".
AI? They spent 2 years removing the "hey" from "hey Siri". Everytime you turn off Apple Intelligence, a software update will force it back on. It still can't handle simple queries. And the UX even more confusing. There's a lot to lambaste in this department, but all of it has been said already. WWDC25 didn't address any of it. The interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak was even more awkward and telling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEkK1YzqBo
I want Apple to be good. I want them to make great products again. I want them to innovate. But I guess I'm the fool for wanting a corporate entity to be good and cool.
Wait, there were/are people who believe Apple Wallet doesn't track them in some way?
Well at least it’s acknowledged Apple privacy is only perception and not actually secure or private.
Meanwhile Apple preserves a backdoor in the iMessage end to end encryption (in the form of non-e2ee iCloud Backups) for the FBI.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-...
(iCloud e2ee availability is irrelevant; nobody has it enabled.)
If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.
It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.
The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"
Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.
> then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?
That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.
> it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.
The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.
> But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.
Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.
Ios26 specifically enables promotions in wallet which is viewed as a feature that can be enabled/disabled
I didn’t find it too intrusive, but it was surprising. It’s probably not a road Apple wants to go further down.
