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As I read TFA, I thought to myself, &quot;if it gets bad enough, I&#x27;ll just load Linux on my Macs.&quot; And then it occurred to me how I got started using Apple products. So grab a cuppa for story time. It was a time that I worked for Microsoft, and mmm, mmm, wasn&#x27;t that uncarbonated company soft drink tasty. But as I dicked with some Plays for Sure(tm) device for the last time, I got fed up and told the spouse, &quot;get in the car, we&#x27;re going to BellSquare to buy iPods.&quot; iPods turned into ditching the Windows Phones for iPhones, then a hackintosh to get a feel for OS X Leopard, then &quot;fine, I&#x27;ll get a MacBook if I&#x27;m going to do iOS development on the side&quot;.<p>Fast-forward fifteen years, and it&#x27;s a house full of HomeKit, Apple Watches (loving that new Ultra), MacBooks, HomePods, etc. It all works well together, so it&#x27;s easy to justify ditching $DEVICE for an Apple product. And when Apple Premium (one price for all of Apple&#x27;s services such as TV+, iCloud storage, et. al.) came around, well, of course I said &quot;put that on the Apple Card, please.&quot;<p>The point I&#x27;m driving at is that a household of Apple products started with one simple purchase of a couple of music players. But keep up the advertising crap to the point that I&#x27;m loading a non-Apple OS on Apple hardware, and that unravelling thread might take the rest with it. &quot;It all works so well together&quot; is a blessing and a curse. I&#x27;m pretty sure that if, whatever the reason, we ditch the iPhones the rest of it goes with them.

I started moving my things out of Apple two years ago. Two years on, I&#x27;m still entrenched in a few places. I can tell you, Apple does everything they can to keep you in. Slow download rates, surprisingly frequent failed downloads from iCloud.com, requesting your data from Apple takes at least a week while they put it together, etc.<p>One of last form of lock-in that I&#x27;m struggling with is iCloud Photo Library. A service that has been a blessing and a curse. I&#x27;ve been saving my photos there for the better part of a decade.<p>I&#x27;m working on getting my photos out (first by requesting my data from Apple, then from iCloud Drive on Windows) and I&#x27;m appalled - everything gets dumped into one directory. Inconsistent file naming. Timestamps not always accurate, and &quot;Date Taken&quot; seems to have disappeared from a number of my photos. Albums are not included (unless you count them being a list dumped into a csv). All of that data is kept inside iCloud.. only for them- not for you.<p>So what comes next is a long journey to re-organize all of my photos by year, month. I&#x27;m not even sure if my Hidden photos got copied over.<p>This is all 100% a dark pattern to keep users locked into Apple. How many people would get this far? Not many- my wife would have given up at having to request her data from Apple. Then how many would stop when they find out all of your photos get dumped into a single directory (30k photos!) if you try to leave?<p>All of this is to say, I&#x27;m done with Apple. I want control of my data, not this circus show.

This general trend of deteriorating UX in widespread services is extremely exhausting and depressing.<p>The accuracy you could get with Google searches in 2005-2010-ish was amazing. Knowing <i>how</i> to Google was a secret weapon of computer literacy, you could find <i>anything</i>. Now I save links on a small server (I work on many machines) unless something is posted here on HN, as it&#x27;s one of increasingly few places where I can search and actually find things.<p>Same story with YouTube, searching for a video there has become an exercise in self flagellation.<p>I don&#x27;t know if it was Netflix that started the ball on nonsensical, avant garde categories followed by thousands of auto-playing calls to action, but combined with intrusive ads and obfuscation the day-to-day experience on mainstream internet really sucks the joy out of whatever amazing content that lurks in the cracks of what is actually a set of amazingly marvelous technology.

The pushing and pulling was there all along:<p>The play&#x2F;pause media key automatically starting the Music app, suggestions defaulting to include content from paid services (hey that movie is available on Apple TV!), maps links only working with Apple Maps, searching for selected text opens Safari and disregards your primary browser, permanently enabled share menu options for iCloud and Airdrop.<p>Privacy settings increasingly spread out and opaquely named. No more central unique identifier reset button, but individual ones for each app placed in different submenus. Completely disabling Siri has become some sort of Easter egg hunt. Not that it&#x27;ll actually stop the data outflow, though.<p>Aggressive surfacing of ecosystem capabilities such as proximity unlock by nearby Apple watch, wake on bluetooth or network, etc. These features were previously configurable through the GUI, but those conveniences have been removed and the features are enabled by default.<p>Local configuration profiles (a free, easy, local, and accessible way to configure your system) are being slowly phased out in favour of third party remote Mobile Device Management services such as Jamf or, of course, the one Apple launched not too long ago.<p>These new advertisements are so prominent and the implementation so obviously bad, that I&#x27;m almost suspecting them to be merely a distraction from the much more insidious tricks they&#x27;ve been pulling in the background.

Why the hell are they entering this grubby, grubby industry? They leave money on the table all the time - they have banged on for years about their whole philosophy of saying No to a thousand things for everything they say Yes to - why have they said yes to this?<p>Aside from a handful of RPIs, my entire family uses Apple gear. But for the first time in 2 decades, I&#x27;m wondering what a platform change might look like.<p>Considering my investment in Apple gear, even getting me to the &quot;only looking&quot; phase is pretty remarkable.

Are there any examples of large public companies that have reversed course on ads and purged them from their products?<p>It seems once they are in place, they infest and eventually permeate to all levels of the product, like cockroaches.<p>I suspect it is just impossible for executives to argue against something tangible (ad-revenue) in favor of something intangible (ad-free experience).

Between Google Search decreasing in usability and accuracy for pretty much everyone I know in service of more Ads, Netflix Ad tier causing an exodus and now Apple poisoning what was their premium brand to squeeze ad revenue I can&#x27;t help but think these businesses are starting to cannibalize their core value to their users in service to their shareholders. Companies with Ads are like Rats in that experiment with the button and a wire going to their pleasure center. Tap the button all day but they won&#x27;t actually do anything useful and everything else wastes away.<p>For a while I&#x27;ve been thinking about the public markets and each time I arrive at the conclusion that the public markets can be really bad for consumers and bad for the businesses themselves. In the end the pursuit of higher stock value for share holders in the short term puts a company at odds with it&#x27;s customers and it&#x27;s own initial value proposition. Obviously an IPO is a desirable goal for founders, and maybe (very obviously?) more so their investors because it&#x27;s a liquidity event and everyone get&#x27;s paid, but I think for any one running a successful company thinking about what you shackle you and your company to by going public should be a long and hard think, because you&#x27;re going to wind up making choices at the expense of literally every value and use your business purported to represent.<p>This is also why when choosing to make a startup, as defined by a high growth company designed to quickly arrive at a liquidity event (IPO and publicly traded obviously included) you should really understand if you want exactly that. I&#x27;ve watched at least one founder realize she didn&#x27;t want that and that she did want to run a business for the customers and the value they were being provided and try to get off the train and it basically wrecked the business.<p>When I read stuff like this I&#x27;m always reminded of the line in Aesop Rock&#x27;s song &quot;None Shall Pass&quot;:<p>&quot;Fine, sign of the swine in the swarm when a king is a whore who comply and conform&quot;<p>I guess this was a really long winded way of saying, know the game you&#x27;re playing before you choose to play it and know who&#x27;s actually calling the shots.

I love my Apple products but I am incredibly worried about Apple&#x27;s future. I hate ads, I never see them, if something is showing me ads I pay to remove them or stop using that app&#x2F;service. Currently I&#x27;m incessed by Zoom showing me ads after calls even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it.<p>It&#x27;s incredibly saddening to see Apple start to put ads in more things. It&#x27;s not the premium experience I&#x27;m looking for (and paying for). I love linux for servers but I&#x27;m sorry, the desktop is just not my cup of tea. One things on the mac that I enjoy is the quality and style of most 3rd party apps that I use. It&#x27;s a level of polish that I don&#x27;t see anywhere else, at least at the same consistency. Call me vain, call me whatever you want but I like looking at pretty UI, I&#x27;m staring at my monitors for 8+ hours a day, I&#x27;d like to enjoy what I&#x27;m doing. An ugly UI isn&#x27;t unusable but it adds a small subconscious &quot;tax&quot; that is real and does add up (at least for me).

When I saw ads in the Windows Start menu, I switched to Ubuntu. Haven&#x27;t looked back and life is good. Except that the command line command apt-get sometimes displays an ad for Ubuntu Pro...

Depressing to see Apple going toe to toe with Android for the worst app store experience possible.<p>Used to be that people chose MacOS&#x2F;iOS specifically because it wasn&#x27;t crawling with ads for dumpster-quality apps.

I&#x27;m fully bought in to the Apple ecosystem and I have always been puzzled when I hear about Apple perverting their product with the taint of advertisements. I recently realized that my puzzlement is because I don&#x27;t use Apple News or Stocks and I do all app discovery away from the (cr)Appstore.<p>Unfortunately, I guess that the advertising infection will spread to the point where it is unavoidable. At that point, I will drop Apple and pray that there is a functional alternative.

&gt; <i>” I willingly paid a tremendous amount for the hardware, and I choose to pay nearly $500 annually to access Apple services, but seeing ads being further promulgated across the software feels, well, gross.”</i><p>I stopped paying to see ads when I quit subscription TV. I feel I will soon have to quit paying for ads when getting a new phone.

If this is the direction Apple takes, I will be leaving their ecosystem. My attention is finite, and advertising is attention theft.

I feel genuine empathy and a little vicarious sadness (not sarcastic or ironic) for all the Apple diehards who loyally went through thick and thin with Apple, including them nearly going out of business, only to discover that Apple is not Different or Exceptional and is, in reality, just another large publicly traded company with the goal of maximizing shareholder returns.

Apple is a 2+T dollar company. How much is enough? Is is really such a priority to introduce ads to keep growing each and every damned quarter? And what if people stop buying their hardware because of the crap they&#x27;re doing with their software; will they stop ads to refocus on hardware or will they milk the fuck out of the people who do keep buying their hardware?

I remember a friend saying Apple should have bought YouTube before Google did, and thinking this person just doesn&#x27;t get Apple. YouTube is&#x2F;was a chaotic low quality mess, and Apple only does high quality, beautiful products, with a top quality experience. Now it seems like the idea of Apple owning YouTube doesn&#x27;t seem off-brand at all.<p>This is really disappointing. I am not willing to see ads at all in my daily life, and am willing to pay for the privileged. It seems Apple is now making that impossible.

Yeah screw that. I typically loathe Apple criticism - it’s usually so confused and biased. But this makes me ask, as a former employee:<p>Why is Apple loosing its way again?<p>Is this what happens when Steve is gone for long enough?<p>Get back to your roots!

Completely agree with the sentiment in the article. I&#x27;d generalize even more and say that Apple software has been going downhill for several years now, and adding in more ads is just a continuation of that trend.<p>On the other hand, they still create phenomenal hardware. The compromise of using Apple hardware and non-Apple software (often paid) has worked well enough for me so far.<p>Some examples:<p>- Podcasts &lt; Overcast<p>- iCloud Drive &lt; Nextcloud (as Hetzner-hosted service)<p>- Notes &lt; Obsidian<p>- Safari &lt; Orion, Arc<p>- Apple Mail &lt; Superhuman (or Spark, or Gmail)<p>- Apple Maps &lt; Google Maps<p>- Pages, Keynote, etc &lt; Google Suite<p>- Terminal &lt; iTerm<p>Likely more I&#x27;m forgetting.<p>edit: formatting

Advertising is a virus that will filter through its hosts until the host is killed.

I just got my first iphone. A 3rd gen(?) SE. I love the device. I&#x27;m not a big computers guy, but have used two different mac book pros and most recently a household imac for personal since 2008. On mobile, after BlackBerry, I went samsung &#x2F; android in large part to intentionally fragment my device &#x2F; os ecosystem, not put all my eggs in one cart. Samsung devices are very clever. They do not have the same cozy feel as apple, but they are smart. Now my work buddy texts me a twitter link, and it shows on my desktop when i open up safari to check my mail. I don&#x27;t like that, I don&#x27;t want that. Maybe I am not ready for ambient computing? I love apple devices, but the os increasingly seems openly confrontational if not hostile. In part I finally switched to apple on mobile because i was tired of android bloat, but it has followed me, just in a different form. A lot of the angst in this thread seems to be borne of the competing incentives of hardware, software, and services. Apple used to be more of a walled garden than they are today. And that, before they were a trillion dollar concern, maybe gave them latitude to execute purely on creative vision.

It&#x27;s funny remembering how people would say stuff like &quot;if you aren&#x27;t paying for the product, you ARE the product&quot;, and someone even tried to make a Twitter clone where the only differentiator was that you&#x27;d pay for it to &quot;prevent&quot; ads and tracking.<p>I thought back then that even if it succeeded in gaining enough users to beat Twitter, it would fail because eventually investors&#x27; demand for growth would force them to add ads anyway. You see this happening with cable TV, Roku, and now even Apple.<p>The only way to prevent this is to have a company motivated by something other than growing profits, but that comes with its own problems: stagnation, bloated bureaucracy, and capture by special interests without profit to keep the organization honest and lean.<p>I don&#x27;t know what the right solution is, only that in very competitive for-profit markets, companies don&#x27;t dare to worsen the user experience with ads lest they lose customers to a competitor. Given the barriers to entry for developing a new smartphone, including the strong network effect of the app store and OS APIs, this is not that type of market. Most androids already have ads and bloatware, so Apple isn&#x27;t facing any competitive pressure on this front, sadly.

There used to be a time when Apple hard- and software delighted me. It was expensive but the cost could be justified.<p>Today, Apple hardware gets ever more expensive while adding ever less value for me. With the recent push towards growing service revenue, I fear Apple is going to betray parts of their original DNA.<p>I usually never invoke this, but in this context it feels justified: this would have been impossible with Steve Jobs alive. He would have shut this shit down with a vengeance.<p>Despite being a capitalist with every fibre of his being, he knew where not to go, which line not to cross. If done anyway, in error, he reversed course immediately. I don’t see even a faint shadow of this in Tim Cook.

The problem is he incentive to squeeze money out of ads because there’s less innovation happening elsewhere. Yes they’re M* chips but I mean big innovation.<p>how do we ever break the cycle of growth at all costs demanded of public companies?

I’m a business-hours Windows user who drifted into Apple for all my personal devices, aside from a Windows box for amateur radio stuff, and an ever-changing fleet of Linux VMs at Hetzner.<p>It’s about time for a new phone, but the selection of suitable (that is, small) Android devices is dire, and I don’t think I want to get sucked further into Google’s ecosystem, either.<p>So I’ll buy myself what might be one last iPhone 13 mini, and start copying my iCloud photo collection off onto my still-capable 2013 MacBook Pro, and then my NAS, a month at a time.<p>That should give me a couple years to figure out what comes next.

Feels like when the App Store first launched and was quickly dominated by fart apps, except this isn&#x27;t being driven by devs polluting the App Store, it&#x27;s being driven by Apple to an already polluted App Store.

&gt; What angers me about this trend is that many of the experiences I treasure are being devalued in order to prioritize more revenue<p>How naive to think the richest company in the world sees you as anything but $.

That&#x27;s why open ecosystem is a must, so you can easily migrate.<p>Constantly repeated argument from Apple users is that Appstore&#x2F;iMessage&#x2F;iOS is closed&#x2F;doesn&#x27;t allow sideloading&#x2F;alternative clients in order to protect the users.<p>Now you can see what happens if you put company in the position, where you have to spend thousands of dollars, multiple hours hours and lots of explaining to your friends in order to leave their walled garden.

I do all my work on Macs, and I love the ergonomics of MacOS, but I refuse to use any Apple apps. I hate how Apple broke its own Save&#x2F;Save As paradigm, and the iOS-ification of things like iTunes&#x2F;music on the desktop. I use Little Snitch to block all Apple services except in rare instances where I want to download something from the App Store.

Recently I find Amazon Alexa constantly asking &quot;Did you know...&quot; or &quot;By the way...&quot; at the end of most exchanges to introduce or sell me new features, and it drives me completely nuts. Just f- off and do the thing I told you to!<p>Imagine if your hammer had a little LCD running ads for new nails (and other less relevant crap).

Until they make ads an OS-level feature, this doesn&#x27;t bother me on a practical level, because I don&#x27;t use any first party apps of theirs. I&#x27;m thinking about how this affects, me, and I don&#x27;t think I use any Apple apps on a daily basis. I guess I never thought about how none of the best apps (imho) in any category I use on iOS are made by Apple. I agree with the premise of the article, but I can work around this phase of Apple&#x27;s heel turn.

The ad auction model is just so ridiculously profitable. You have companies literally trying to out-spend each other for the same service. It’s insane.

Anyone thinking Apple was heralding privacy was wrong, they were just preparing the ground to be the only one to profit on your data.

Reminds me of this SMBC: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smbc-comics.com&#x2F;?id=2490" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smbc-comics.com&#x2F;?id=2490</a><p>I wonder if Apple will offer an opt-out subscription for ads once they get annoying enough.

Do execs not consider long term brand damage? It is hard believe that very smart people, who likely use these products themselves, can be blind to the damage they are doing long term, eroding the trust they have earned.<p>Surely this leads to lower profits in the future (say, in a decade), and should be considered a bad business decision now

Sad to see the pirates fall.<p>I guess Apple was the last of the good old companies to finally give in and start it&#x27;s path to destruction.<p>Time to go back to the drawing board and make the companies for the next few decades.<p>Time for the pirate flags to fly high. Hopefully young kids are not just leet coding and actually building brilliant stuff.

Unlimited greed. As if they needed this ad money.

How does one spend $500&#x2F;mo on Apple services?

I&#x27;d download Spread Sheets.

This infuriates the shit out of me, and I&#x27;m a heavy Apple user and a Product Manager. The role of PMs is to be tastemakers, among other things, and I have no idea which PM wrote the PRD&#x2F;6-pager for adding ads everywhere in iOS, but they should be fired immediately. This experience is the epitome of un-premium, and is a huge step towards there being no experience differentiation in the product between Apple and Android. Apple is able to charge significantly more than competitors for its products &#x2F;because&#x2F; the experience has a premium look and feel compared to the ghetto that is Android. Turning iOS into a ghetto too is definitely not a reasonable product vision.

There is an increase of click baity titles on hn. Titles should be like the &quot;Subject&quot; field of Email. Short, crisp, giving a tldr of the body.

Advertising is not inherently or automatically bad.<p>Spam is bad. Being overrun by low quality ads is bad.<p>I don&#x27;t mind ads when its GOOD advertising.