I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.
Which is why the fitness and (for the apple watch ultra) more extreme and expensive sports like mountain climbing and diving are featured. You get the luxury class of people without looking out of touch with the premium class of people.
This happens in Apple News and it's really sad to see. All of the ads are terrible:
* junk hearing aids that appear to produce a strange glow in the users ear
* lead generation ads with clickbait statements (looking right now at "Senior Drivers in Your State With No DUI Should Read This")
* "Motley fool issues first-ever 9x buy alert" (wow first ever!)
* "Little-known Roth conversion strategy allowed by IRS"
I've never intentionally clicked on an ad in Apple News.
This is a service I pay for and these ads are insulting.
How much revenue are they producing relative to my subscription fees? Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.
They're not targeted. I actually searched around the app settings looking for an option to enable targeted ads. If I'm forced to see ads, I'd much rather see ads for things I might actually care about.
The people running subscription services within Apple may be measured on metrics (subscriber count/growth) that may not be aligned with the long-term interests of the company as a whole, especially since brand value and the effect of software advertising on hardware sales are hard to quantify.
This is what is going to kill Apple (for me at least).
I've been wondering when the Google-ification of Apple will start.
The iPhone boom really let them have the luxury of not behaving like complete assholes for a long time. Now, in order to hit ever higher quarterly targets, they're probably going to start enshittifying like everyone else.
I think for luxury brands advertising is even more important. Because they need to justify the inflated value of their brand.
Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.
Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.
True. But that’s advertising the product, not advertising in the product. It’s the latter that’s happening here. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands on a Ferrari, starting it up, and … finding an ad on the touch screen.
Apple enlisted Hermes to try and convince watch people that they understand luxury. The leather wrist strap costs as much as a new Apple Watch. As another noted here, premium vs luxury can be quite a step.
They make great hardware. They used to make great devices - but a great device needs the whole user experience to be great. Ad-ridden UI does not make for a great device. Doesn’t matter if it’s first or 3rd party ads.
It’s a great shame. Apple used to be the design standard to aspire to. Now it seems to have embraced enshitification. All because the market needs that share price to keep growing. And lacking leadership good enough to find another way.
Because Apple product managers don’t know what the Apple brand means anymore, because all of the real Apple people slash smart people noped out of there in the last ten years.
It’s sad but true. Grandma has dementia. The lights are on but nobody’s home.
The Apple we loved is gone. Jobs died at the release of the iPhone 4S and even Tim Cook has aged out now.
Last one out, turn off the lights. (After declining the Apple Lighting subscription ad.)
If it was random products, it might devalue the brand(or at least the app itself), but its clearly just advertising a more powerful product from apple for doing something similar, if you can't do what you want with the given app.
Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...
They are in business to make money. Brand value and quality are far more nebulous as indicators of value than, say, "We got Brand X to pay us $Y for an ad campaign that will sit in Keynote for the next Z days and will book that revenue on the quarterly results".
The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.
I recently redeemed three months of free Apple TV+, and it drives me crazy to get a preroll of other TV+ movies and TV shows I couldn't care less about.
I like to think it's only going to be there while I'm freeloading on the three-month offer, but all I know is that I don't get this with Netflix.
Don't you have to type a pin in the US if you make card payments above $75 or so? We do here in Europe. I don't with my mobile payments (tokenised) because I already authenticated to my own device.
This is a really big benefit for me to mobile/watch payments. I don't have to type my pin code on a device I may not trust. I use my biometrics so people don't get a chance to shoulder-surf my pin code. Also, I get a instant notification of how much I actually paid. I don't get that when using the card.
Seeing today's Ledger supply chain attack the concept of compromised payment terminals is a lot less academical now.
When running a card as credit, I can't remember ever having to type a pin in the US, although it's possible I've forgotten. As debit, yes, pin, although that may have changed; I run everything as or through a credit card these days so I haven't made a POS debit transaction in a good while.
Ah yes here in the EU we don't really use credit cards for normal payments. Just debit ones.
Racking up credit is frowned upon here, it hurts your credit rating, unlike the US where it is required to build a credit rating. The best credit rating here you get if you don't have any credit at all.
Also, things like payment protection and cashback schemes aren't really a thing here or are much weaker than in the US so there isn't any reason.
Making products informed by how people used tech vs. making products informed by what will drive the stock price up.
Phones you could comfortably hold in one hand vs. phones that need popsockets for relieving hand fatigue because they're basically pocket-sized TVs now
Minimalist Watches that were hyper-focused on fitness and notifications vs. Watches that try to be (and largely fail at being) mini-iPhones.
Voice assistants that were out of the way until you needed them vs. voice assistants that are in your face constantly and can't easily be turned off.
"We won't put ads into anything ever" vs ads slowly creeping into every ancillary Apple product.
Google and Microsoft are just as bad. Startups trying to bring back the "tech as tools" era are under-funded and are mostly trying for acquisitions anyway.
I don't know where to go from here other than slowly detaching from tech, and that makes me incredibly sad.
My hope is that AI will unlock a new class of operating system and apps. IMHO it will come from the Linux world. I am hopeful that a company like System76 makes a platform that is both good 'sexy' Apple-level hardware partnered with a beautiful UI.
I think the sibling poster was probably correct. I have the pro version, and somebody mentioned the ads are in the home version which would make sense.
I said I never denied they were there, I just cant see them in my copy so its wrong to call them ubiquitous in Windows.
If you work at OpenAI, congrats on getting people to subscribe in the first place. The marketing is working, OpenAI customers think they're safe from ads!
This is all very bad timing. Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks, it is the wrong time for proprietary software providers to start pissing off and exploiting all their users.
I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
> Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks
No you can't. Someone can certainly burn a gorillion tokens to make a 3rd rate clone of Adobe suite that get's posted to HN as pre-alpha that fuels 1000 comments like this though.
I wonder how long will it be until people use ai to start reverse engineering all Apples APIs and protocols so that they can make 3rd party open source apps which can use the fruity ecosystem from outside the wall.
> I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
Servers running Linux are not desktop computers in direct competition with macOS. They cannot be configured as macOS clones.
Come to think of it, the only people who I know of who use Linux as a desktop OS are people in the technical fields: my college CS professors, InfoSec friends, etc. None are just the average person, technically-speaking.
Why are you going on about linux on the desktop? This thread is about people being able to vibe code a MacOS clone, and judging by the speed at which things are progressing Im guessing that one day they will successfully be able to do that.
Pretty sure most people commenting here didn't even look at the post to see it's Apple promoting their own related product to their customers, not a third-party ad
Ads are Ads, people hate to see them whatever they are advertising. Especially when they already paid a lot of money to join the ecosystem, upselling to paid customers feels cheap.
Yes they could, they would, and you know it. They'd be serving you malware, they'd look even worse, they'd be for scams, they'd sell all the data they harvest from you to 1000 other companies, etc.
I don't think they can. People expect third-party apps to sell them stuff, but not their OEM.
Apple used to differentiate themselves by not using their OEM apps for ad space. Now they're copying the exact same "curated" promotions style that made Windows packin apps intolerable.
The possibilities certainly are endless. Every recipe you view has potential to sell you the ingredients, or the chefs latest cookbook, or maybe even full meal subscriptions like SimplyCook or HelloFresh if it detects you might not like cooking or be very good at it. Who knows what else you might look up on it which could be enhanced by selling you an extra service or two.
Maybe unpopular take but ... this isn't just any ad. It's a link to another related product in the ecosystem. Discoverability has always been difficult and there are so many features that remain largely unknown to users because of it.
The title makes it seem like I can purchase an ad and have some kind of ill-fitting content jumping around the screen, trying really hard for my attention. Instead I see an upgrade path from what is free and widely available to a potentially better product. I see this with open source projects too.
It's still an ad though. It's just a context-targeted ad: You get it because you use this product and they want to upsell you. That you might want the product doesn't make it less of an ad. On the contrary. Discoverability is one the purposes of ads. Increasing perceived value is another one but not the only one.
It's the line of thinking that companies like Google tend to push. "All our tracking gives you ads for products you are more likely to want!". Well, yeah. Because those ads are more likely to convert to a sale they are more insidious in my view.
I always like it when I see ads for things that I absolutely do not want because it means they haven't figured me out properly. The few times I watch Amazon prime I tend to get car ads, and I hate cars, I'm never going to buy one. Or dodgy gambling website ones, I don't gamble at all, not even a lottery ticket. It means they don't know what I really want and the ad doesn't really put mental pressure on me to part with my money because it's irrelevant.
Is Apple tracking you here? Seems like you are using a free product which advertises its paid-variant. That's a far cry from targeted ads via tracking and profiling.
The title makes it seem like Keynote is showing ads in the UI, and from the screenshot I see a button that if I press it, will accept my credit card so I can buy a thing.
Just because it's hard to discover things I don't yet own doesn't mean I want them shown to me while I'm making a slideshow.
Another new annoyance: the Settings app has 2 red notification icons because Apple is trying to sell me extended AppleCare. Apparently no way to turn off these notifications.
It does, and then it comes back a few days later as a friendly reminder to "continue setting up your iPad" as it does on my work one.
In my case it's not AppleCare but Apple Pay. Which is actually pretty useless on an iPad anyway but still it keeps pushing it to me and I've owned the thing for years and clicked the go away button many times.
It's been doing this for years now to try to get me sign into iCloud. I finally gave up and signed into the free version, then disabled every single service.
Apple has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Why do they want to associate it with this tasteless nickel-and-diming? If nothing else, surely this is bad for business over the long term. Gain a few low-value subscriptions, lose a few high-value hardware purchases.
They do this exactly because they are such a valuable brand. Their customers are generally pretty well-off and thus a really highly desired target community: People with plenty of money to spend and who already proved they buy Apple products. This is the creme de la creme of advertising targets.
It's also why so many companies love to "partner" with Apple. Like the goldman sachs credit card, the new LG promotion with the homeview etc. Note that this comes hot on the heels of the LG "We own the glass" scandal. Yet Apple finds it more important to promote them. I'm sure LG pays Apple for this "partnership", not the other way around.
> I'm sure LG pays Apple for this "partnership", not the other way around.
Depends if Apple wants their shiny OLED panels, LG are a leader in manufacturing them.
The last time I checked Apple didnt manufacture panels, or have an international banking and credit system. There fore it needs its 'partners' as much as they do.
Because they can. Most people are remarkably tolerant of ads, time wasters, attention sinks, and disrespect. It won’t sell that many fewer pricey laptops or high margin phones if the nonstop subscription nagging on a $1.5k pro iphone already doesn’t.
they've been showing ads for years. literally every year i get an ad for the new version of the os. heck sometimes they show popups advertising security updates. apple has no shame.
Apple has always been ultra-narcissistic, pushing designs and features that make their designers feel smart but actively hurt customers and decrease the utility of their products. Now they're even losing that. They ran out of good ideas shortly after Jobs died. Now they've run out of bad ideas and they're speed-running enshittification.
Yeah same here. I decided to use 5/6 year old trash PCs running Debian. They work absolutely fine. I think I’m actually more productive and certainly less distracted and less broke.
My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.
Genuine question: what does Keynote do that PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress doesn't? I'm a bit out of the loop and just use Typst for presentations now, but I'm not suggesting it as an alternative to Keynote for anyone who doesn't mind a compilation step.
Keynote doesn't have any unique features that other software doesn't have, but it's particularly well-designed: everything can be done more simply and more cleanly in Keynote. Maybe it's just a matter of habit, but I can't seem to get used to other software, especially LibreOffice Impress, which I find very unpleasant to use.
You're saying that normal people, when they open an application to perform a task, should reasonably expect to be hit with an upsell and enter into an upsell conversation, rather than focusing on the task they want to achieve?
Do you not see that the problem is not a pedantic distinction between "is informing someone of a purchase opportunity actually advertising" - the problem is I wanted to do some work and Apple wants me to use my limited attention to think about whether or not i want to give them more fucking money?
It's ever so slightly disingenuous to call this "showing ads": It appears to be letting you know about a paid DLC for the app you are running not "this space is for sale".
That said, I don't think it's even a slippery slope from here to "this space for sale".
I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.
They're a premium brand, not a luxury brand. That's an important distinction.
Dell, HP, etc. all have premium products as well as their economy ones. Apple just doesn't do cheap and economy products.
When that gold plated Apple Watch came out, you could feel the discomfort. That's luxury brand territory.
Even the most expensive Apple Watch isn't in that "luxury" category anymore.
Which is why the fitness and (for the apple watch ultra) more extreme and expensive sports like mountain climbing and diving are featured. You get the luxury class of people without looking out of touch with the premium class of people.
Somebody listened to the Acquired episode on LVMH!
I have no idea what that is, but I'm interested. What is LVMH?
I’d thoroughly recommend the Acquired podcast - particularly the episodes about the creation of Visa, and Vanguard.
Fashion conglomerate that owns Louis Vuitton, Dior, et al
This happens in Apple News and it's really sad to see. All of the ads are terrible:
* junk hearing aids that appear to produce a strange glow in the users ear * lead generation ads with clickbait statements (looking right now at "Senior Drivers in Your State With No DUI Should Read This") * "Motley fool issues first-ever 9x buy alert" (wow first ever!) * "Little-known Roth conversion strategy allowed by IRS"
I've never intentionally clicked on an ad in Apple News.
This is a service I pay for and these ads are insulting.
How much revenue are they producing relative to my subscription fees? Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.
> Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.
Becasue they are making much more than $1 per month on selling targetted ads using your highly personalised and accurate ad profile.
They're not targeted. I actually searched around the app settings looking for an option to enable targeted ads. If I'm forced to see ads, I'd much rather see ads for things I might actually care about.
Yes they are, here you go:
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iphf60a6a256/io...
Cool thanks. I enabled personalized ads. I'll disable again if quality doesn't improve.
Apple, I'd much prefer to just pay to have no ads.
Apple News is almost entirely ads masquerading as articles.
The people running subscription services within Apple may be measured on metrics (subscriber count/growth) that may not be aligned with the long-term interests of the company as a whole, especially since brand value and the effect of software advertising on hardware sales are hard to quantify.
This is what is going to kill Apple (for me at least).
I've been wondering when the Google-ification of Apple will start.
The iPhone boom really let them have the luxury of not behaving like complete assholes for a long time. Now, in order to hit ever higher quarterly targets, they're probably going to start enshittifying like everyone else.
> I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue.
Are they devaluing their brand?
Their sales are up.
Brand Finance Global 500 holds that at #1.
Fortune World’s Most Admired Companies places them at #1.
I cannot think of a single metric supporting their brand has been devalued.
Well, aside from a single poster on HN who doesn't seem to realize they're out of sync with the rest of society.
I think for luxury brands advertising is even more important. Because they need to justify the inflated value of their brand.
Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.
Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.
True. But that’s advertising the product, not advertising in the product. It’s the latter that’s happening here. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands on a Ferrari, starting it up, and … finding an ad on the touch screen.
maybe I’m just jaded at this point but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ferrari did have pop up ads on the screens in their cars
Apple enlisted Hermes to try and convince watch people that they understand luxury. The leather wrist strap costs as much as a new Apple Watch. As another noted here, premium vs luxury can be quite a step.
> They’re a luxury goods brand
How so? Just about any major manufacturer has hardware in the same price range.
Because most major manufacturers have hardware in a much lower price range than Apple does.
Everyone has a high-end but Apple doesn't even bother with the low-end.
>They’re a luxury goods brand,
Or maybe they aren't. They make great devices. I use them. I don't think of them as a luxury though.
Even if they’re not:
> They make great devices
They make great hardware. They used to make great devices - but a great device needs the whole user experience to be great. Ad-ridden UI does not make for a great device. Doesn’t matter if it’s first or 3rd party ads.
It’s a great shame. Apple used to be the design standard to aspire to. Now it seems to have embraced enshitification. All because the market needs that share price to keep growing. And lacking leadership good enough to find another way.
Because Apple product managers don’t know what the Apple brand means anymore, because all of the real Apple people slash smart people noped out of there in the last ten years.
It’s sad but true. Grandma has dementia. The lights are on but nobody’s home.
The Apple we loved is gone. Jobs died at the release of the iPhone 4S and even Tim Cook has aged out now.
Last one out, turn off the lights. (After declining the Apple Lighting subscription ad.)
If it was random products, it might devalue the brand(or at least the app itself), but its clearly just advertising a more powerful product from apple for doing something similar, if you can't do what you want with the given app.
Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...
They are in business to make money. Brand value and quality are far more nebulous as indicators of value than, say, "We got Brand X to pay us $Y for an ad campaign that will sit in Keynote for the next Z days and will book that revenue on the quarterly results".
The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.
Customers' desires are a nuisance, but if you ignore them long enough they go away.
If you mean "customers go elsewhere", do they? Where else is there to go? Microsoft and Google do even more tracking and advertising than Apple.
Linux doesn't have the same support in a lot of critical areas. It's better than it was, but it's still not close enough to be a real alternative.
I recently redeemed three months of free Apple TV+, and it drives me crazy to get a preroll of other TV+ movies and TV shows I couldn't care less about.
I like to think it's only going to be there while I'm freeloading on the three-month offer, but all I know is that I don't get this with Netflix.
It's also how films have worked since the 1930s; We are coming up on a century of trailers at the beginning of films.
This happens if you are a paying AppleTV+ customer as well
Is it skippable?
For now.
Yes.
My iPhone showed me an ad for apple pay (the nfc radio, not the credit card), which I regularly use.
Today, I started carrying cash, and switched back to using the NFC chips in my credit cards.
My iPhone 13 mini will probably be my last iOS device. Tap to pay was hard to setup in grapheneos the last time I checked.
I guess I won’t miss it after all.
Just tape your CC to the back of your phone, and your muscle memory will work the same.
Don't you have to type a pin in the US if you make card payments above $75 or so? We do here in Europe. I don't with my mobile payments (tokenised) because I already authenticated to my own device.
This is a really big benefit for me to mobile/watch payments. I don't have to type my pin code on a device I may not trust. I use my biometrics so people don't get a chance to shoulder-surf my pin code. Also, I get a instant notification of how much I actually paid. I don't get that when using the card.
Seeing today's Ledger supply chain attack the concept of compromised payment terminals is a lot less academical now.
When running a card as credit, I can't remember ever having to type a pin in the US, although it's possible I've forgotten. As debit, yes, pin, although that may have changed; I run everything as or through a credit card these days so I haven't made a POS debit transaction in a good while.
Ah yes here in the EU we don't really use credit cards for normal payments. Just debit ones.
Racking up credit is frowned upon here, it hurts your credit rating, unlike the US where it is required to build a credit rating. The best credit rating here you get if you don't have any credit at all.
Also, things like payment protection and cashback schemes aren't really a thing here or are much weaker than in the US so there isn't any reason.
No. For most card payments (ie non-debit) no PIN is used in the US.
I dearly miss the Apple of ten years ago.
Making products informed by how people used tech vs. making products informed by what will drive the stock price up.
Phones you could comfortably hold in one hand vs. phones that need popsockets for relieving hand fatigue because they're basically pocket-sized TVs now
Minimalist Watches that were hyper-focused on fitness and notifications vs. Watches that try to be (and largely fail at being) mini-iPhones.
Voice assistants that were out of the way until you needed them vs. voice assistants that are in your face constantly and can't easily be turned off.
"We won't put ads into anything ever" vs ads slowly creeping into every ancillary Apple product.
Google and Microsoft are just as bad. Startups trying to bring back the "tech as tools" era are under-funded and are mostly trying for acquisitions anyway.
I don't know where to go from here other than slowly detaching from tech, and that makes me incredibly sad.
My hope is that AI will unlock a new class of operating system and apps. IMHO it will come from the Linux world. I am hopeful that a company like System76 makes a platform that is both good 'sexy' Apple-level hardware partnered with a beautiful UI.
I refuse to give up on my dreams! :)
Apple is just as bad as Microsoft in this regard. They just won't leave their users alone.
You've got to be kidding? Microsoft has literal third party ads in the OS...
Really? I havent seen them. Not saying they dont exist, but they havent been shoved down my throat.
I think they are only in the "home" version, so if you're using a business version of Windows you won't see them
I am using pro, so you are probably correct.
They are literally in the start menu.
ok, but I cant see them. They arent in mine, so maybe they arent ubiquitous?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-t...
why would you lie about such an easy to check fact?
I think the sibling poster was probably correct. I have the pro version, and somebody mentioned the ads are in the home version which would make sense.
I said I never denied they were there, I just cant see them in my copy so its wrong to call them ubiquitous in Windows.
I don't have them either. So maybe you are just incorrectly making a broad assumption about Windows devices.
i mean, both the article and my own experience with start menu ads on windows (which pushed me off the platform) seem to agree with me
If you work at OpenAI, I want to let you know I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription today because you won't stop pestering me with upgrade offers/ads.
Go do that to your free users, not the ones paying your salary.
If you work at OpenAI, congrats on getting people to subscribe in the first place. The marketing is working, OpenAI customers think they're safe from ads!
They are only ads when other apps do it, when apple does it they are "Enhanced UI Recommendations".
I have been exiting the Apple ecosystem for the last year. Feeling vindicated. It’s turning into the trash heap they were once proud not to be.
Jobs was the driver of taste at Apple, and he’s been gone for a long time, and nobody has had that job since.
Taste improved and died long after Jobs was gone.
This is all very bad timing. Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks, it is the wrong time for proprietary software providers to start pissing off and exploiting all their users.
I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
> Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks
No you can't. Someone can certainly burn a gorillion tokens to make a 3rd rate clone of Adobe suite that get's posted to HN as pre-alpha that fuels 1000 comments like this though.
That is what people can do right now, what will they be doing in 5-10 years.
That company is a VC-funded, for-profit concern.
According to their cofounder they burned less than $1k USD in tokens, which explains the pre-alpha not-fit-for-purpose quality of their apps.
I wonder how long will it be until people use ai to start reverse engineering all Apples APIs and protocols so that they can make 3rd party open source apps which can use the fruity ecosystem from outside the wall.
> I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
You could.
You very, very, very likely will not.
They know this and act accordingly.
Linux + thousands of developers with AI agents is going to show otherwise this next decade. I think. I hope?
Linux has millions of man-hours worth of code. Did it help Linux become a mainstream consumer platform?
However it did help Linux power approximately 70% of servers in the entire world.
Servers running Linux are not desktop computers in direct competition with macOS. They cannot be configured as macOS clones.
Come to think of it, the only people who I know of who use Linux as a desktop OS are people in the technical fields: my college CS professors, InfoSec friends, etc. None are just the average person, technically-speaking.
Why are you going on about linux on the desktop? This thread is about people being able to vibe code a MacOS clone, and judging by the speed at which things are progressing Im guessing that one day they will successfully be able to do that.
Just the other day someone got modern Nvidia cards running on hackintos!
> I could make a full macOS clone
With like a million bucks worth of tokens? Sure.
> Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
I think you're missing a point here.
Thing is, only one person has to spend those tokens once then the world gets its clone.
That is cheap, that will be one or two senior engineers one year cost in Cupertino.
Link is giving "The page you are looking for isn't here." 11 hours after this post went up (per HN values).
Pretty sure most people commenting here didn't even look at the post to see it's Apple promoting their own related product to their customers, not a third-party ad
Oh we’re well aware. There’s nothing cheaper than upsell nags when you spent what you did already.
How much did you pay for keynote?
Considering you cannot run Keynote on non-Apple hardware, it cost "whatever the hardware cost".
So I can start saying that Apple's software is ad-supported now?
The price is in the hardware.
$1,999
About $5000 for the Mac book it came on.
Ads are Ads, people hate to see them whatever they are advertising. Especially when they already paid a lot of money to join the ecosystem, upselling to paid customers feels cheap.
An unwanted distraction is an unwanted distraction.
Nobody uses that to excuse Microsoft showing OneDrive ads.
Apple's own cross-promotions are so ugly and ham-fisted that I'm not sure third parties could do worse: https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-to-ditch-unsolicited-f1-ads-n...
Yes they could, they would, and you know it. They'd be serving you malware, they'd look even worse, they'd be for scams, they'd sell all the data they harvest from you to 1000 other companies, etc.
I don't think they can. People expect third-party apps to sell them stuff, but not their OEM.
Apple used to differentiate themselves by not using their OEM apps for ad space. Now they're copying the exact same "curated" promotions style that made Windows packin apps intolerable.
Yeh if we ignore all the reasons stated, they certainly can't I guess.
I looked, and I'm infuriated.
This is exactly the sort of thing that Apple avoided when it had strong management from Jobs. Now...
Does that make any difference at all? When Windows does it, people pop a fuse, but Apple gets a pass?
Pffffff..
Fanboys gonna fanboy; I'm reminded of the "switch to mac” parody animation by ubergeek from decades ago.
It's hard for my eyes to look away from that liquid glass toolbar train wreck to even see the ad.
Just before they release their first smart home device with a screen.
I wonder whats coming?
Prominent screen in the kitchen used as recipe stand showing ingredients etc.? The possibilities are endless, and I think we're going to love it.
The possibilities certainly are endless. Every recipe you view has potential to sell you the ingredients, or the chefs latest cookbook, or maybe even full meal subscriptions like SimplyCook or HelloFresh if it detects you might not like cooking or be very good at it. Who knows what else you might look up on it which could be enhanced by selling you an extra service or two.
Yes, we will own nothing and we will be happy
Yeah someone made that point visually in the comments there too, quite aptly.
Last I checked, no ads in iA Presenter:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090557
Maybe unpopular take but ... this isn't just any ad. It's a link to another related product in the ecosystem. Discoverability has always been difficult and there are so many features that remain largely unknown to users because of it.
The title makes it seem like I can purchase an ad and have some kind of ill-fitting content jumping around the screen, trying really hard for my attention. Instead I see an upgrade path from what is free and widely available to a potentially better product. I see this with open source projects too.
It's still an ad though. It's just a context-targeted ad: You get it because you use this product and they want to upsell you. That you might want the product doesn't make it less of an ad. On the contrary. Discoverability is one the purposes of ads. Increasing perceived value is another one but not the only one.
It's the line of thinking that companies like Google tend to push. "All our tracking gives you ads for products you are more likely to want!". Well, yeah. Because those ads are more likely to convert to a sale they are more insidious in my view.
I always like it when I see ads for things that I absolutely do not want because it means they haven't figured me out properly. The few times I watch Amazon prime I tend to get car ads, and I hate cars, I'm never going to buy one. Or dodgy gambling website ones, I don't gamble at all, not even a lottery ticket. It means they don't know what I really want and the ad doesn't really put mental pressure on me to part with my money because it's irrelevant.
Is Apple tracking you here? Seems like you are using a free product which advertises its paid-variant. That's a far cry from targeted ads via tracking and profiling.
The title makes it seem like Keynote is showing ads in the UI, and from the screenshot I see a button that if I press it, will accept my credit card so I can buy a thing.
Just because it's hard to discover things I don't yet own doesn't mean I want them shown to me while I'm making a slideshow.
Objectively, this isn’t much different from an app offering in-app purchases.
Subjectively, however it feels significantly different to me.
Reasons why that’s the case that I can think of are:
- it shows the offer even when users aren’t searching for the offered product?
- the product that is offered doesn’t signal “in-app purchase”?
- it doesn’t feel like Apple to do this in this way.
Also, I tried to reproduce this by updating to the latest Keynote and couldn't. Are we sure this is real and not just rage-bait?
I just updated and see the same "ad" under New Document -> Choose a Theme.
Maybe you already own Creator Studio so there is no need to show it to you?
It's not just related it's for getting the paid features of Keynote itself.
Agree, not an ad. Title made it seem like the excessive ads we see in games or iphone apps.
The 8 word title?
Apple stopped caring about quality quite a few years ago but those decisions are only hitting us now. The next few years are going to be very stupid.
If we are lucky, Apple can right the ship in time. I wouldn't hold me my breath though.
I miss Steve Jobs.
Another new annoyance: the Settings app has 2 red notification icons because Apple is trying to sell me extended AppleCare. Apparently no way to turn off these notifications.
I thought you could click on it, press no/cancel, and it would disappear.
As of this morning, that does not work for me.
It does, and then it comes back a few days later as a friendly reminder to "continue setting up your iPad" as it does on my work one.
In my case it's not AppleCare but Apple Pay. Which is actually pretty useless on an iPad anyway but still it keeps pushing it to me and I've owned the thing for years and clicked the go away button many times.
It's been doing this for years now to try to get me sign into iCloud. I finally gave up and signed into the free version, then disabled every single service.
ha there is one way
Apple published the instructions more than 40 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQRR-HC_G60
Apple has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Why do they want to associate it with this tasteless nickel-and-diming? If nothing else, surely this is bad for business over the long term. Gain a few low-value subscriptions, lose a few high-value hardware purchases.
They do this exactly because they are such a valuable brand. Their customers are generally pretty well-off and thus a really highly desired target community: People with plenty of money to spend and who already proved they buy Apple products. This is the creme de la creme of advertising targets.
It's also why so many companies love to "partner" with Apple. Like the goldman sachs credit card, the new LG promotion with the homeview etc. Note that this comes hot on the heels of the LG "We own the glass" scandal. Yet Apple finds it more important to promote them. I'm sure LG pays Apple for this "partnership", not the other way around.
> I'm sure LG pays Apple for this "partnership", not the other way around.
Depends if Apple wants their shiny OLED panels, LG are a leader in manufacturing them.
The last time I checked Apple didnt manufacture panels, or have an international banking and credit system. There fore it needs its 'partners' as much as they do.
Because they can. Most people are remarkably tolerant of ads, time wasters, attention sinks, and disrespect. It won’t sell that many fewer pricey laptops or high margin phones if the nonstop subscription nagging on a $1.5k pro iphone already doesn’t.
I remember seeing this back in January
From the title I imagined 3rd party ads, not an upsell for some feature of the app/platform.
Who tf uses keynote anyway lol
Don't like it? Vibe code your own Apple® Keynote® software.
No, the hot tip is to REA a patch to stop showing the ads, keep the rest.
I still use the old version of Keynote for this reason.
Are we too sensitive? It's their own product
No. Ad-hate is justified regardless of the product being sold or the platform presenting the ads.
Ads ruin everything.
Upselling your own paid customers is cheap. You already took their money, make them feel valued not like you just want to squeeze them for more.
If you also agree that people were too sensitive dragging Microsoft then yah, we are getting too sensitive
I don’t like OneDrive ads from the same reason. They are still ads in a product that should be ads free.
Ads are annoying whether it's for third party products or not.
Time to vibe code an OG Keynote clome...
they've been showing ads for years. literally every year i get an ad for the new version of the os. heck sometimes they show popups advertising security updates. apple has no shame.
Apple has always been ultra-narcissistic, pushing designs and features that make their designers feel smart but actively hurt customers and decrease the utility of their products. Now they're even losing that. They ran out of good ideas shortly after Jobs died. Now they've run out of bad ideas and they're speed-running enshittification.
Apparently I made the jump to Linux just in time. They are just your run-of-the-mill enshittifying Rent® Seeking© Optimizer™ now.
Yeah same here. I decided to use 5/6 year old trash PCs running Debian. They work absolutely fine. I think I’m actually more productive and certainly less distracted and less broke.
My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.
> now
Serivces have been a huge (and growing) chunk of their revenue for a long time
I’d like to switch to Linux, but I can't find a sufficiently functional alternative to Keynote, which I need every day for my work. It’s a shame.
Genuine question: what does Keynote do that PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress doesn't? I'm a bit out of the loop and just use Typst for presentations now, but I'm not suggesting it as an alternative to Keynote for anyone who doesn't mind a compilation step.
If PowerPoint is sufficient, it (mostly) works on Linux now: https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake
Keynote doesn't have any unique features that other software doesn't have, but it's particularly well-designed: everything can be done more simply and more cleanly in Keynote. Maybe it's just a matter of habit, but I can't seem to get used to other software, especially LibreOffice Impress, which I find very unpleasant to use.
Well, given that AI can now decompile and port software... :)
Claude, make me a latex presentation on <topic> filled in with this outline.
If you don’t know what latex is, substitute “html”.
Similarly, the choice of LLM is unimportant.
I still feel like iPhones are good devices, but yeah apple is going down hill.
I also get a lot of life out of MacBooks, they have been pretty reliable for me.
They stopped releasing phone sized devices 5 years ago.
Never forget.
Keynote showing an upsell for the premium version of Keynote is not an ad.
How is upselling not commercial promotion?
What do you think the selling part of upselling is referring to. It is for commercial promotion.
I know, but I'm referring to the "not an ad" part. Ads are literally commercial promotion.
So are upsells. A is B does not imply B is A.
Your argument is “It’s not an ad, it’s a commercial promotion”?
My argument is that it is an upsell.
You're saying that normal people, when they open an application to perform a task, should reasonably expect to be hit with an upsell and enter into an upsell conversation, rather than focusing on the task they want to achieve?
Do you not see that the problem is not a pedantic distinction between "is informing someone of a purchase opportunity actually advertising" - the problem is I wanted to do some work and Apple wants me to use my limited attention to think about whether or not i want to give them more fucking money?
What I'm saying is that there are no ads in the UI of the app. How annoying upsells can be is a different conversation entirely.
Yes it is.
It's ever so slightly disingenuous to call this "showing ads": It appears to be letting you know about a paid DLC for the app you are running not "this space is for sale".
That said, I don't think it's even a slippery slope from here to "this space for sale".
As other people have said, if this was Microsoft trying to sell you a onedrive subscription would you feel the same?
That is literally an advertisement.
So, an ad for DLC is not an ad?