Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy (techradar.com)

544 pointsby MC9958 hours ago416 comments

AnonC 7 hours ago

I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.

But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!

From this article

> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.

From a recent post by John Gruber:

> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]

Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...

api 7 hours ago

Ad revenue is bad revenue if you're going for the high end of the market. If it has ads, it's crap.

Apple has all but conquered the high end of the market, but that ad revenue... it's so tempting... soooo tempting... just one hit...

malfist 7 hours ago

What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?

What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies

graemep 7 hours ago

I do not see a lot of ads on Android but i think that might be my particular (light and limited) usage.

You are right though. A duopoly is rarely a competitive market, especially for complex products (it can be for commodities)

rootusrootus 7 hours ago

> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage

Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.

kyriakos 7 hours ago

I am either blind to ads or i see no ads in android (samsung). of course many apps have ads, at least not in the actual OS.

microtonal 4 hours ago

They also try to sell Samsung Care+ through the settings app.

TheDong 7 hours ago

> Switch to android which has even more ads?

Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).

iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.

Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.

What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.

eldaisfish 7 hours ago

I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.

Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.

mitxela 2 hours ago

And AT&T shouldn't allow you to connect other phones, or modems at all. You should only be able to get a phone by renting it monthly from AT&T - everything else should be illegal.

Dylan16807 an hour ago

Personally I did none of that on my android (except set up firefox with ublock), and I get very few ads and they're easily stopped.

palata an hour ago

> The average person has no idea what lineageOS is

The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.

Izkata 7 hours ago

> Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier

Or just none? I'm not doing anything special and the only ads I ever see are from some games.

HeWhoLurksLate 2 hours ago

I get texts from my carrier that are treated specially and I didn't buy my phone through them

armadyl 5 hours ago

> What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on.

I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.

AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago

> There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.

Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.

Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.

armadyl 4 hours ago

> Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs.

Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.

There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.

And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.

lostlogin 4 hours ago

> You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.

You might if there were only two restaurants and both were really meaty.

Yes, there are more than 2 phone OS options but nearly the whole of the market is those 2.

armadyl 4 hours ago

Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share. People act like Apple was just miraculously granted market share over Blackberry and that they didn’t create a competitive product to earn that spot.

Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.

Terr_ 3 hours ago

> Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share.

"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."

Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.

AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago

> Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new.

"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?

> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.

That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.

"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.

> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.

If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?

If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?

> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”

Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.

armadyl 27 minutes ago

> "Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?

The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.

> That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing. "If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.

I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.

Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).

> If I create a messaging app…

Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.

I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.

> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.

Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.

mitxela 2 hours ago

They do. People won't buy good products if they have green bubbles. Guess who controls the bubble color.

Capitalism is the art of making your customers act like this.

armadyl 26 minutes ago

This isn’t permanent. We see the rise and fall of plenty of brands overtime (Nike, Mitsubishi, etc).

If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.

coldpie 7 hours ago

I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.

Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.

Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.

curt15 7 hours ago

At least Android allows truly alternative web browsers with ad blockers that aren't handicapped by Manifestv3 limitations.

Teever 6 hours ago

I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.

I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.

microtonal 4 hours ago

it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it

It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.

Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.

animuchan 6 hours ago

Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).

Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)

Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.

petre 4 hours ago

I guess you can disable or uninstall Photos but I don't know anything better so I'm currently ignoring the nags.

I was horrified about how many ads my wufe has on her iPhone. I mean web ads in Safari. It's unsusable.

lostlogin 4 hours ago

> I mean web ads in Safari.

That’s just the internet isn’t it?

Not sure we can blame Apple for that, but I’m sure they could cook up a decent blocker if they wanted.

microtonal 4 hours ago

Install Wipr on her phone. Problem solved.

About Photos: why not disable notifications for the Google Photos app?

petre 2 hours ago

They're disabled, I get the nags in the app.

VibrantClarity 4 hours ago

It's worse than that. Google Photos sends push notifications telling you to buy photo books and prints unless you opt out. Play Books also sends push notifications telling you to buy particular books; it's also opt out. I'm semi-certain other built-in apps like YouTube and the Play Store do the same. However, once you turn all that junk off, the Pixel experience is pretty good.

microtonal 4 hours ago

Why would you even enable notifications on these apps?

I'm on GrapheneOS, so they are not enabled by default, but I think on Google certified Android you can also switch them off. Also, besides that, if apps implement notifications nicely, they are nicer on Android, because you can turn on/off notifications per category/channel. Of course, some apps just put everything together.

wredcoll 6 hours ago

What ads does android have? I see ads when I'm inside specific apps, youtube, chrome, etc, but not when I'm using apps that don't have ads?

pfg_ an hour ago

When I first switched to Android, I was shocked to see Google's Photos app send me an ad for buying printed printed framed photos. After turning that off, I haven't noticed many ads.

cyberax 5 hours ago

My stock Pixel phone has zero ads. It prompts you to enable things like Wallet and all the AI stuff, but I just turned that off, and it's not bothering me anymore. There are no persitent ads.

adrian_b 5 hours ago

Android by itself does not have any ads.

I have had until now 4 Android smartphones, which did not have any ads whatsoever.

Like other posters have said, if you do not buy the phone directly, but subsidized by some carrier, then it might come with crap installed on it.

Of course, currently Google appears to make efforts to make Android worse, so it would not be surprising if ads would appear.

microtonal 4 hours ago

Which Android though? AOSP doesn't have ads. But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services (McAfee VPN, McAfee security scan, OneDrive, etc.). I heard that Chinese phones are similar. Even Pixel pushes Google One in places.

The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).

BizarroLand 2 hours ago

Moto phones are relatively ad free. There's a few (removable/disableable) apps on it at stock that have ads, the rest is all good.

kbelder 2 hours ago

I've been very happy with the low-end moto phones I've bought, and plan to continue with them until they inevitably get worse.

happymellon an hour ago

> I heard that Chinese phones are similar.

My Xiaomi has no adverts.

But then the Samsung S22 I had before didn't have adverts. Certainly didn't come with McAfee.

realusername 39 minutes ago

> But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services

I have a Samsung and I've never seen such ads.

The kind of ads they are talking there in the article would be in cheap Chinese phones in the Android world I think.

worik 3 hours ago

> Switch to android which has even more ads?

I use Android

No ads.

I feel left out, thank Dog for that!

PontifexMinimus an hour ago

> Switch to android which has even more ads?

I never see ads on my android phone

palata 44 minutes ago

> Switch to android which has even more ads?

I am on Android, I have no ads.

dpoloncsak 3 hours ago

Throwing it out there, YouTube is top-of-their-class and ran mostly from ads

mitxela 3 hours ago

YouTube's market is still shit though. High end of that market is those billionaires who pay for actual cinemas in their mansions.

rapind 7 hours ago

Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.

cousinbryce 7 hours ago

Where would the luxury market go? Asking for a friend

rapind 7 hours ago

In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.

Cider9986 7 hours ago

GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.

Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.

[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...

https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...

Pantone and some sound partnership.

readthenotes1 6 hours ago

Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.

Likewise, no Android Auto

Cider9986 6 hours ago

There is Android Auto. There's contactless payments in Europe through Curve, Paypal, and some specific banks. Some companies are working on bringing them to the US.

klardotsh 6 hours ago

Funny enough, the only part of Apple Pay I use with any frequency is the browser/app integration part, basically as a much more convenient alternative to PayPal sometimes.

IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.

4chandaily 6 hours ago

No android auto? What are you basing this on? I ask because I am responding from grapheneos while connected to android auto, and I am concerned I am in the wrong universe again.

drnick1 6 hours ago

> Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment

Cash is much better for privacy. The government, banking system, and countless intermediaries should not know how I spend my money.

So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance.

Cider9986 5 hours ago

I agree about cash, but we are talking about a luxury experience. In fact, GrapheneOS has talked about it [1].

> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance

I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.

[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371

"Moving from cash to credit cards, PayPal, etc. is an ongoing privacy disaster."

al_borland 6 hours ago

From what I've seen of GrapheneOS, it's not a luxury product, it's a product for tinkerers, who don't mind finicky granular configs. If I'm paying a premium, I expect sensible, privacy respecting, defaults that I can use out of the box. Not constant fumbles until everything is "setup".

Cider9986 5 hours ago

I don't think there's any defaults you need to change out of the box besides installing the apps you want.

But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.

microtonal 4 hours ago

I think you have a wrong idea about GrapheneOS. You install the sandboxed Play Store/Services through their app store and then it's pretty much the same as any other Android phone. Except that it doesn't get in your face with preinstalled crap (Google, Apple, or Samsung). On the GrapheneOS forums there are a lot of non-technical people that install GrapheneOS and don't have many issues. The primary annoyance is Google's abuse of their monopoly with Play Integrity.

I would say it often feels more like a luxury product than an iPhone or Google-certified Android phone because it's not full of cheesy stuff. It's what iPhone and Pixel would look like if Apple/Google didn't want to push you: subscriptions, AI, movie/music apps, etc.

armadyl 5 hours ago

As someone who has daily driven both side by side as much as I love GOS, AOSP / Android absolutely does not feel premium compared to iOS. Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS. And the FOSS apps on Android are extremely subpar in terms of feel compared to iOS (off the top of my head look at how bad the Fossify Contacts app is compared to Google Contacts) but that’s the trade-off.

I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.

Cider9986 5 hours ago

> I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.

"There's a high chance." https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117299954135808210

In other posts they've said they will be sold with GrapheneOS out of the box.

armadyl 5 hours ago

Oh damn nice. Guess we’ll also see later today too since the Signature should be revealed at the snapdragon summit

cyberax 5 hours ago

iOS? "Polish"?

Even AOSP is head-and-shoulders better than iOS.

armadyl 5 hours ago

It is subjective, to me AOSP just feels extremely rough and undercooked in a lot of places

cyberax 4 hours ago

Try disabling animations in AOSP and see how it feels. You won't be able to go to the painfully slow iOS afterwards.

microtonal 4 hours ago

Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS.

Sorry, but no.

I also have an iPhone for $REASONS. Both my prior iPhone Air and my new iPhone 18 Pro still frequently stutters. Even scrolling some settings screens (which are very simple), I can often see frames getting dropped. Apple apps like the App Store are one huge frame-dropfest (even if you let it preload all assets). Apple can't get a nearly 1500 Euro phone with the fastest single-core performance and probably the fastest GPU to render normal window chrome smoothly anymore.

My P10P with GrapheneOS, which only has a midrange SoC by modern standards (don't believe what Google tells you) and it is buttery smooth.

iOS got even more terrible with Liquid Glass, so many things are badly readable, even with the slider set to completely opaque in iOS 27.

iOS used to be premium compared to Android. But Apple enshittified iOS over the last few years. Even most Apple pundits agree.

Since people seem to disagree because they simply cannot see it, here are two recordings at 0.5x speed so that even people who are not sensitive to stutters can see it:

https://drive.proton.me/urls/S24N1S17XG#56iNGffWKqZr

https://drive.proton.me/urls/DH527V6GRR#625BpPuAcYPb

TheDong 7 hours ago

They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (for the Kindle it was $20 one-time).

For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.

rapind 7 hours ago

Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?

I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.

TheDong 7 hours ago

I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.

I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.

I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.

rapind 7 hours ago

> I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.

This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.

gloosx 6 hours ago

>I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.

It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension

SoftTalker 6 hours ago

That doesn't help you if you use the YouTube app on your phone, which I'm guessing is what a huge fraction of the viewership does.

gloosx 5 hours ago

But you can just use the browser with an adblocker for Youtube on the phone, which also allows you to play audio in the background for free e.g. for playing music, what's the point in using the app at all?

SoftTalker 5 hours ago

I'm speculating about what most mobile YouTube viewers actually do, not what makes the most sense.

delta_p_delta_x 6 hours ago

> seat heater subscription services going for BMW?

Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.

autoexec 6 hours ago

> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (

It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"

bix6 7 hours ago

Is BMW still doing the $20/mo for heated seats or whatever? All these companies man… not everything needs to be recurring revenue ffs.

daveidol 7 hours ago

That one gets a worse rep than I think it deserves.

You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.

genxy 6 hours ago

It is already built into the damn car. Everyone already paid for it.

techdmn 6 hours ago

It's bad because you already paid for the hardware, any additional charge is just a money grab.

tavavex 3 hours ago

Soon enough they'll be asking you to pay for Storage Space Pro (lets you open the trunk) and Intelligent Manual Media Control (lets you slightly lower the volume of ads that automatically blast out of all the speakers when the car is on)

bix6 6 hours ago

Really? You think a luxury brand charging a subscription for heated seats, a basic add on, is inline (haha rip inline 6).

alentred 6 hours ago

> On the flip side

Pun intended?

dmux 6 hours ago

Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!

alentred 5 hours ago

Don't give 'em more ideas! :)

akudha 6 hours ago

Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.

autoexec 6 hours ago

> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.

It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.

MichaelZuo 6 hours ago

The real question is why is the median Apple decision maker circa 2026 vastly more short term greedy than the median Apple decision maker circa 2012?

GolfPopper 6 hours ago

While I don't know, my suspicion is that the market is saturated, but the company is still hungry for "numbers go up".

"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.

It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?

kleene_op 6 hours ago

I think it's not just Apple. Everyone and every company seem to become greedier and greedier. Economically, the world is not in a great place, apart from a minority which just gets richer and richer.

autoexec 6 hours ago

I think some of it just that different people have different priorities. Some of what protected Apple was vanity. I think Steven Jobs cared about how people saw him and his products. He wanted to be the guy who made a premium product that he thought was cool and was proud of. The longer time went on, the less Apple execs cared about what he would have wanted and started caring more about what they wanted.

I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.

Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.

TheOtherHobbes 5 hours ago

I think the Apple Effect was largely a result of personal narcissism.

Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.

The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.

Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.

The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.

The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.

lostlogin 4 hours ago

What happened to Apple University, or whatever they called Job’s attempt to document their key to success?

Some MBA poisoned it?

asdff 6 hours ago

No more Jobs being tastemaker at the helm. Cook is pure business.

serial_dev 6 hours ago

I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.

But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"

kakacik 5 hours ago

apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.

Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

You mean like when I clicked this article? What an ad filled mess of a website.

qwerpy 6 hours ago

At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.

leftnode 6 hours ago

> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.

merlindru 6 hours ago

it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?

if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?

GolfPopper 6 hours ago

It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.

lotsofpulp 5 hours ago

That applies to businesses with small moats.

Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.

disqard 4 hours ago

> thermocline of trust

Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.

thewebguyd 2 hours ago

Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.

I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).

phforms 6 hours ago

Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…

merlindru 6 hours ago

> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place

JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago

> lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO

You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.

al_borland 6 hours ago

Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?

JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago

> they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?

Yup. If the main differentiator is gone, you move to the next marginal thing that matters, which in this case is working as a map.

al_borland 6 hours ago

> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.

At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].

[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

deathanatos 6 hours ago

Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?

Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?

¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…

al_borland 5 hours ago

The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.

Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.

robocat 3 hours ago

> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt

Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.

Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?

If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?

It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.

Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.

threetonesun 5 hours ago

Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.

al_borland 4 hours ago

The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6 hours ago

> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?

unrented7977 6 hours ago

> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.

You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.

No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.

jjordan 5 hours ago

We need an open phone platform badly.

skupig 4 hours ago

>which is even more bloated and ad infested.

Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.

microtonal 4 hours ago

Even better, Morphe can rip ads out of the native YouTube client :).

asdff 6 hours ago

Where would they go? Android? That's even more spammy and ad ridden. They sure aren't installing grapheneOS.

GuinansEyebrows 7 hours ago

> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.

benoau 7 hours ago

I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.

cyberax 5 hours ago

Who _is_ using the App Store these days? It's such a mess.

lotsofpulp 4 hours ago

Does anyone use the App Store other than to search for an already known app name? I probably have not in over a decade, and I can't see a reason I ever would.

eptcyka 4 hours ago

Best part of searching the App Store for something you know is that even though the hamming distance between the search term and the thing you want is 0, the thing you want will not be at the top of results anyway.

PhageGenerator 39 minutes ago

This causes me so many issues. Rolling out multi-factor authentication and having some no-name random app show up as the first result for "microsoft authenticator" is downright malicious behavior on the part of the app store.

colejohnson66 3 hours ago

I used to. In the "golden days" of "there's an app for that", I would peruse the App Store looking for new games. I spend hundreds of dollars on games doing that. Now, the only games you see really are shovelware or subscription garbage.

alt227 7 hours ago

Ive often wondered if there is some magic internally Appleid setting which turns an account into an ad free one for internal execs.

lostlogin 4 hours ago

If you could buy into an account like this, with the cost being just over the ad profit from my account, I’d be interested.

mat_b 3 hours ago

This would only move the needle further in the direction of a terrible user experience. This is exactly what we don't want.

mentalgear 7 hours ago

Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).

In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.

latexr 7 hours ago

> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products.

I bet they don’t see any ads, because their accounts will have the highest tier (or even a special one above that) of everything.

alentred 6 hours ago

That’s bad hardening. You are not supposed to use your root account for everyday work.

gmueckl 6 hours ago

No, hardening has nothing to do with it. They have a feature flag system deeply embedded in their software. And such systems can totally distribute different flags to different people. And that's how you could easily create VIP accounts with different behaviors than the rest of the world, like all ad festures turned off.

xdavidliu 5 hours ago

reminds of me of an instance where the opposite happened:

> internal email from Bill Gates complaining about the usability of some Windows features. It’s old — from 2003

https://www.techdirt.com/2008/06/25/you-thought-you-hated-wi...

gabrielhidasy 5 hours ago

I'm 99% sure the hardening part was a joke

al_borland 6 hours ago

It's not a root account issue, it's that they have already bought all the services there are to buy. One would assume that once you buy a service, they would stop prompting you to buy it.

Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.

avazhi 6 hours ago

Jobs would truly lose his shit if he saw what Apple has become.

Source - worked at Apple ~2010.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

I haven’t worked for Apple but you’re definitely correct. Just compare what Jobs said about using a stylus with how happy the company was to announce that you could use Apple Pencil with the iPhone duo. It is self-evident. It’s far from the company Jobs once ran.

sandcat_ 6 hours ago

You’re misunderstanding that quote. “If you saw a stylus they blew it!” referred to requiring a stylus to interact with the touch display. Having one optional, mainly for drawing, isn’t quite the same thing.

That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.

debo_ 5 hours ago

Literal pencil-pushers are ruining the product!

mcculley 3 hours ago

Yes, and it makes sense to add the stylus/pencil after app developers had to learn how to deal with finger taps only. Apple did the same thing with the original Mac. There were no arrow keys on the first model, so that developers were forced to accommodate the mouse.

SirHackalot 4 hours ago

I like being able to use Procreate or other image editing software on my iPad, and the only reason I’d consider a foldable in the first place is because I’d like to use it like I use my iPad. What’s so bad about having the option to use a stylus? Who cares what a dead tech oligarch once thought of styluses? Especially when the state of the technology wasn’t where it’s at now. If you could ask Jobs now, maybe he would have changed his mind.

jimt1234 6 hours ago

Jobs has long been vocal about protecting the user experience. Not 100% sure if it's true, but I heard Jobs was originally opposed to custom apps running on the iPhone (the App Store), because he 'didn't want to turn iPhone in Windows'.

asdff 5 hours ago

Jobs was right. Apps are so shitty now I don't even bother. Everything has a subscription now and there's so much noise its hard to actually find signal on the appstore.

qzw 5 hours ago

Imagine if he had stuck to his guns on native apps. iPhone would’ve either died or we’d all be living in a web apps paradise right now.

benoau 5 hours ago

It wouldn't have died - most apps are still just a thin UI over a corresponding online service, and most of the data and services proprietary APIs provide ended up achievable in a browser too. It is really just the internet that makes apps and smartphones useful.

All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.

asdff 4 hours ago

Early on it was different with a lot more stuff actually running locally vs cloud service era. App store predated that for a little bit actually. There weren't microtransactions initially either. What you'd call a AAA game for that platform back then would actually be $9.99 one time payment.

idiotsecant 3 hours ago

OK...but basically everyone uses custom apps because they are tremendously useful. You'd just ban all of them?

anon7000 5 hours ago

Didn’t Jobs frequently lose his shit when he did work at Apple?

onemoresoop 4 hours ago

Indeed. That’s what resulted in Apple beingn different than competition. Too bad Apple engineers were reprimanded and publicly humiliated, sometimes with no fault. But Jobs had a vision that’s been long gone from Apple and it really shows. Sometimes I wonder if Jobs himself would be corrupted by Apple’s success but I’ll never know the answer to that…

grishka 4 hours ago

That's not a given. Visionary people sometimes go mildly insane over time. Source: worked at VKontakte and Telegram and watched it slowly happen to Durov.

flemhans 3 hours ago

How did it affect Durov?

grishka an hour ago

Questionable features like being able to delete anything in the conversation on both sides. Tacky UI choices like liquid glass on Android or the excessive use of Lottie animations every-damn-where. All while being completely deaf to feedback, both from within the team (any criticism makes you "toxic") and from the public. The way he treats his employees isn't exactly good either.

ozim 5 hours ago

Don’t mix apples with oranges Steve was The Apple those guys are CE—replaceable-O-ranges. If board and shareholders want ads there is no one to tell them get lost anymore.

nekusar 5 hours ago

Wow, I read it as "John Temu", which seems to be what Apple is being turned into.

This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.

Glad I'm a Linux user and admin.

bluepeter 5 hours ago

Worth remembering that Steve Jobs championed "iAds"... https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/13/steve-jobs...

SllX 5 hours ago

Yeah & they veered so hard into tying to make them tasteful & not suck that it failed. Turns out the real money is in spyware.

bitpush 10 minutes ago

How so? This smells like Apple Distortion Field. "Yeah our ads are better. Its the other guys' ads that are bad".

The problem with Apple is they make statements that they walk back gleefully at a moments notice.

- Nobody wants a bigger phone - iPhone Pro Maxes

- Nobody wants foldables - iPhone Duo

- We've simplified the product portfolio .. ahem.

- AI is bad - Ours is called Apple Intelligence. Totally different thing.

Think Different indeed.

troupo 4 hours ago

> I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.

Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.

jjtheblunt 3 hours ago

why do you say a hardware VP would be driving adware? totally different part of the apple world, at least when i was there for years.

troupo 3 hours ago

Sorry. For some reason got him mixed up with Steve Lemay lol.

But still.

Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye or Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.

Even here.

Joh Termus was just picked up randomly out of a box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to checks notes lead all of Apple.

jjtheblunt 2 hours ago

> is entirely new to Apple

where did that come from? he's been at Apple since 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ternus

troupo 2 hours ago

Read the original comment: "I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.".

I mean. John Ternus and other execs and senior management had nothing to do anything with it. They were all new, picked up randomly out of the box and only obligingly did the bidding of Tim Cook (or Alan Dye, or both).

dyauspitr 4 hours ago

What are these plethora of eyesore ads because the one that they’re mentioning in this article is the only one I have come across.

buredoranna 3 hours ago

omg, thank you for this

> tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option

rednb 3 hours ago

It is because of things like that that i'm using Android. I feel like one of those boomers having no clue about tech whenever i am handed an iphone: everything feels like a trick, a set of secret gestures and recipes that everybody has mastered but me.

Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.

mitxela 3 hours ago

Android is just as bad. But it has one huge advantage: you can install apps on it.

teekert 2 hours ago

I got a Pixel 10, installed GrapheneOS. Then Google Play (which is sandboxed). I have 99,9% of all apps and a barebones launcher and some barebones fossify apps. Its pretty good, ugly if you let it but not bad

Timon3 an hour ago

Can't say I agree - I honestly tried using an iPhone for a few weeks, and I still couldn't reliably get where I wanted, because there's a good chance some input on the way would suddenly result in a totally different effect.

It feels like 80% of the UI has non-obvious overloads. I must have either skipped the tutorial or been too blind to find it, because otherwise these things are anything but intuitive. I've never struggled as much with any Android device, even with exotic manufacturer UIs.

sandblast an hour ago

Android apps also have the icon-tap-and-hold actions…

bluedevilzn 3 hours ago

“iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users—a highly desirable demographic for advertisers—and provide developers a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low cost applications.”

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/06/07Apple-to-Debut-iAds...

everforward 39 minutes ago

Search on the app store sucks too. I haven't been able to find either a way to search for only apps that charge for downloads (I don't want to watch an ad for features, or nickel and dimed on IAP), or some kind of "minimum price" slider I can use.

That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.

kqp 7 hours ago

Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.

sda2 7 hours ago

I have a script to add an /etc/hosts entry for `127.0.0.1 gdmf.apple.com` and that seems to eliminate any nagging, just remove when it's time to update.

Barbing 7 hours ago

Nice. Someone made a site to notify for updates when you have that subdomain blocked.

https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update/issues/19#issu...

This was after Apple broke the trick to prevent Tahoe update nags.

eviks 44 minutes ago

You'll miss security updates following that site

hobo123 5 hours ago

And even if you have automatic updates turned off, Apple will still start downloading the 15 gigs for MacOS 27, just in case...

itopaloglu83 5 hours ago

And disable certain features like Apple Pay if you don’t have auto-updates enabled.

lightedman 3 hours ago

Sounds like an unauthorized access of my computer - a fine of a dollar per byte, per person, should make Apple turn the hell around. 15 billion dollars times how many Apple users that have been wronged in this manner? Apple would be dead instantly.

layer8 4 hours ago

You can turn off the nagging by joining the Beta updates (profile) for the older major iOS version.

This is not to excuse Apple, just a useful trick.

fedeb95 8 hours ago

I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.

Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.

I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.

I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

boxed 8 hours ago

> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.

You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

hnhg 8 hours ago

They are both infuriating, as a long-time user of both.

wombat-man 8 hours ago

yeah it took me years to get used to the nuances of MacOS after growing up with windows. Both are fine.

bee_rider 7 hours ago

>> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.

sholladay 7 hours ago

I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.

The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.

There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

bee_rider 7 hours ago

I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?

The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

Red = stop (close)

Yellow = yield (minimize)

Green = go (grow)

Makes sense to me.

bee_rider 5 hours ago

It makes sense to me as well, but mostly because I’m familiar with the UI in-and-of-itself. This is a website for computer programmers mostly, we’re exactly the wrong people to ask if a UI is intuitive.

OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!

latexr 7 hours ago

> Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that

It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).

> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.

It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.

> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.

> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great

The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.

> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder

The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.

> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.

> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.

eigencoder 7 hours ago

Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.

For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.

But everything else I pretty much agree with you.

thewebguyd 6 hours ago

All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.

Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.

I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.

Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

My biggest gripe with windows is it will steal your cursor focus from password prompts. And when it surfaces a password prompt, it does not focus it automatically.

I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.

Hilarious. But bad UX.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

I love MacOS and it’s my primary OS and I couldn’t agree with you more on every single one of your points.

They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.

I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.

asdff 5 hours ago

I remember Tiger. Leopard was such a huge upgrade for it. I mean spaces alone, come on, that was huge. All the trackpad gesture control came after Tiger too with the larger unibody trackpads.

delecti 7 hours ago

The keyboard shortcuts are way more inconsistent on Mac. On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as entities. No such rule of thumb exists in Mac.

The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.

eigencoder 6 hours ago

Does ctrl+a not work for you? ctrl+a and ctrl+e work for me across every app I use on my Mac.

delecti 6 hours ago

It seems it does. Thank you.

That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.

Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.

eigencoder 5 hours ago

These keyboard shortcuts are also used in emacs; I'm not sure if that's the source of their inclusion in MacOS or if they have a common ancestor between them.

What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?

delecti 4 hours ago

The difference is when the current paragraph of text has line wrapped. Home on Windows goes back to the start of the current line, Ctrl+A on Mac goes back to the start of the current paragraph.

eigencoder an hour ago

Oh, yeah I get what you mean. I think I've seen the one you want, it might be CMD+arrow key.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

Keyboard shortcuts on Mac are a lot more consistent than windows and Linux actually. On a Mac command + C / V is copy / paste. In Linux sometimes it’s control + c, sometimes it’s control + shift + c.

delecti 6 hours ago

I guess what I mean to say is that there's no consistent paradigm for keyboard shortcuts. It's a lot more memorization and less real pattern to what keyboard shortcut will do what action.

And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.

asdff 5 hours ago

You can set shortcuts to whatever you like on mac though

fedeb95 7 hours ago

I have used a lot of systems, and inside them a lot of programs (I make design choices for a living, even if they are at a lower level, UX and intuitiveness exists also in libraries). I was comparing Mac OS to GNOME and not to Windows because Windows is almost the same as Mac OS relative to my point, just worse.

It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.

eigencoder 6 hours ago

Yeah, I feel that in my bones. They've started down this road, and I don't know they'll be able to turn back.

RankingMember 8 hours ago

I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.

ryandrake 7 hours ago

Same here, I’ve gone from Apple fanboy to slowly dropping all of my Apple products as it becomes time for new purchases. They are just no longer looking at users like me. They keep focusing their efforts on things I don’t care about, while locking me out of control over my system more and more each macOS release. That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old… why bother fighting that?

The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.

2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.

delecti 7 hours ago

> That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old

Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.

benoau 7 hours ago

The last Intel Mac was actually just 3 years ago!

The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.

This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.

ryandrake 7 hours ago

Yes they do offer security updates for what, 7 years? That I consider “kind of ok.” Not great. And yes most Android phones are even worse than that. But OS and application updates? You’re dead to them after 4 or 5 years. AND the whole ecosystem follows suit, so if your Mac is like 6 years old, almost nobody is writing software that works on your system anymore.

prepend 2 hours ago

My 2017 macbook air still gets security updates. And I play lots of games through steam.

My 2020 XR still gets updates and runs every app I need- uber, school stuff, office stuff.

_ks3e 7 hours ago

There are a few projects that let you access iMessage on non-Apple devices. I've been using https://github.com/lrhodin/corten-matrix to relay iMessage to Matrix, and there's also https://openbubbles.app/ for something that runs solely on an Android phone.

ryandrake 7 hours ago

Thanks, I’ll look into both of these.

qwerpy 6 hours ago

I’ve managed to move all of my inner circle family and friends to Signal. We always had one holdout android user and now we don’t care that he’s on android. As a bonus, because I’m on a computer much of the day, I can use a keyboard to send signal messages.

There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.

Barbing 7 hours ago

Thank you for your comment. We’ve charged F1: The Movie to your default card.

jkestner 2 hours ago

I just got my kid a cheap flip phone that isn't as dumb as I wanted, because it's got KaiOS, a FireFox OS offshoot. An undiscovered country with just a few thousand apps in their store, and a web framework to make your own. If HN would get into it like it's an e-ink display, we could have all the little apps we need, and no ads or distractions.

ulimn 7 hours ago

I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.

What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.

On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...

hansonkd 7 hours ago

I feel like Apple is always pushing the dev side forward in pretty awesome but small ways.

I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking

asdff 5 hours ago

One step forward two steps back. Containers are cute. Used to be able to boot into another OS entirely just a few years ago.

ajross 7 hours ago

> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.

Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.

"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.

[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.

ulimn 2 hours ago

Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I'm happy you also found yourself a good machine! :)

And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.

ajross an hour ago

> Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.

No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.

RandomGerm4n 7 hours ago

I highly recommend Asahi Linux. It runs pretty well on MacBooks with the M1 chip.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

Unless you want to use external monitors

jonesy827 5 hours ago

HDMI out works great on M1 and M2 chips, and DP alt mode output is nearly ready, and works if you compile an experimental kernel. I daily drive an Asahi Linux ALARM M1 Pro macbook, and I have almost zero complaints.

iAMkenough 5 hours ago

Does the experimental kernel finally support connecting to a Studio Display?

jonesy827 4 hours ago

Yes, it does work with Fairydust, but you do need to use a USB-C cable in place of the included thunderbolt cable at the moment.

iAMkenough 4 hours ago

Hell yeah. I’ll be giving that a shot again this weekend.

I got tired of having to haul a separate HDMI display out for Asahi use.

RandomGerm4n 5 hours ago

There's the experimental Fairydust Branch which lets you connect a monitor via USB-C. However if you want to use more than one external monitor DisplayLink is currently the only option that works reasonably well. Unless you have a Mac with an HDMI port in which case you can use it.

cyberax 5 hours ago

There's work being done on that front: https://www.reddit.com/r/AsahiLinux/comments/1w2e946/thunder...

OptionX 7 hours ago

IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.

Basically everyone is getting shafted.

LetMeLogin 7 hours ago

Agreed, I swapped to iPhone about 4 years ago, because I couldn't find a phone for myself from a tons of options(one company did that, another did something else, etc..).

iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.

I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.

VohuMana 6 hours ago

I honestly miss my Windows Phone, solid performance and battery life. The platform was never big enough for there to be much issue with third party apps and I could write what ever software I wanted and load it onto the phone without too much pain.

I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though

warkdarrior 7 hours ago

Wasn't Google ordered by courts to low third party app stores? So more freedom?

kayson 7 hours ago

I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.

Cider9986 7 hours ago

Me too. Android for the most part has much better UI.

The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.

Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.

VPNs work much better on Android.

Settings is laid out better.

Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.

lack of back button is a crime.

can't customize home screen launcher.

clock alarms often doesn't work

I like Vanadium (Chromium) a lot more than Safari. Everything is so well thought out. For example, on iOS, the open in new tab brings you to that tab so if you want to open a bunch, you have to go back to the tab you're branching off of. On Chromium, it works like on desktop.

default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.

The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

I prefer iOS UX wise but I agree with you on keyboards, settings, alarms

Edit: and rotation

rootusrootus 7 hours ago

I have no loyalty, I've switched back and forth several times. I haven't concluded that either is better than the other, just different (and these days, not really -that- different). Though I do appreciate the tight integration between the iPhone and my MBP, that is definitely a sticky feature.

fedeb95 7 hours ago

right now I have the same feeling; some time ago I felt that entering the iPhone "mindset" made sense as you could gain in ease of use by sacrificing some "control".

jlarocco 6 hours ago

Well even if you think the iPhone UX is great, they'll change it for no reason in the next release.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+

not_a_bot_4sho 6 hours ago

Same here. Owned every initial iPhone but went to Pixel a little while back and it's a much better experience.

With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.

anonthrownaway 6 hours ago

>wtf their UX designers are thinking

I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.

ndiddy 7 hours ago

> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:

- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?

- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?

- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?

- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?

- Why don't I have any system tray icons?

- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?

nozzlegear 7 hours ago

- Why do I need a damn extension for everything in Gnome?

fedeb95 7 hours ago

this is a fair point. I am referring to more "objective" things, if anything can be, in design. Let's take as an example the alt+tab behaviour with multiple virtual desktops. In GNOME, as it is in Windows too by the way, alt+tab cycles inside the virtual desktop you're in, allowing for efficient matrix-like navigation, and allowing to split tasks between desktops. On Mac OS, alt+tab cycles on all your open programs, making you jump between desktops. To me, this is rather unintuitive. It could be habit, but there is a clear difference in result regardless of habits, and I think the most productive choice is the GNOME-Windows one, and the more "intuitive" one in the sense of what a user might expect out of a virtual desktop, that is, creating a new desktop with its own apps. Of course this is my impression and I am well free not to buy a Mac :)

asdff 5 hours ago

You can do that same thing just a little different way. Say you want to go through all open apps in one desktop. On my mac its 3 fingers scroll up on trackpad then all windows are exposed. Basically the same function as what you want. Yes technically you are clicking on a window not the application icon but who cares.

sagarm 3 hours ago

Yeah, Apple's OS is clearly not designed for keyboard/mouse users. Triggering this on a standard keyboard requires using both hands (Ctrl-up arrow) and then switching to the mouse. Super annoying.

On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.

cheesecakegood 3 hours ago

“Requires” is a strong word. Apple does have an extremely easy mouse-only solution for this and it dates back over a decade: map the fan-out selector (I forget what they call it these days, maybe Mission Control?) to a “hot corner”.

NamlchakKhandro 5 minutes ago

Keep defending Apple till your grave. Please

2b3a51 2 hours ago

Debian Trixie Gnome 48 or so. In Settings | Multitasking right down the bottom there is App Switching with two options: 'Include Apps from all workspaces' and 'Include Apps from the current workspace only'. Debian has the all workspaces option set by default. Gnome Tweaks is installed, and the extensions to have minimise and maximise buttons on the right of windows are switched on by default.

(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).

some-guy 7 hours ago

> Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?

Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.

luqtas 7 hours ago

dios mio!

i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist

your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP

now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)

Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box

armadyl 6 hours ago

My experience was the same. GNOME is by and far imo the best DE on Linux when it comes to consistency and being the most accessible to non-technical users. However it’s far, far behind macOS’ UX.

Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.

jlarocco 6 hours ago

Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to use GNOME. There are a ton of window managers that run on Linux, and you can find one that works better for you.

There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.

SoftTalker 6 hours ago

It's linux, you can do everything in the terminal. I've never understood what purpose a "desktop" serves.

Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.

Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.

nkrisc 4 hours ago

> Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities

Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.

card_zero 4 hours ago

If I want to start a program I can click its icon in the taskbar, if I want to see my files I can click the file manager in the taskbar, and since these actions are done with the mouse I can simultaneously lie back in bed while eating trifle with a long spoon.

jlarocco 2 hours ago

I don't see what point you're trying to make. Those two examples work identically in the OSX terminal.

sapphicsnail 2 hours ago

Do you adjust audio settings in the terminal? I've been moving away from using my mouse but anything related to audio or display settings intimidates me.

asdff 5 hours ago

Mac is just a different philosophy. Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management. That is possible for you. There are several tools for this, e.g. Amethyst.

But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.

The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.

This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.

bakugo 6 hours ago

My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.

Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.

2b3a51 2 hours ago

Debian Trixie so Gnome 48 or so. Yes, program names truncated in the overview but when I hold mouse pointer over the icon, the full name appears. Not ideal, but I'm assuming borderline acceptable for discovery of applications by examining their icons.

The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.

(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)

leidenfrost 4 hours ago

GNOME 2 used to mimic Classic Mac OS UI, plus it was super customizable and easy to create extensions for.

Peperridge Farm remembers.

someguyiguess 6 hours ago

Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form. They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!

Andrex 6 hours ago

> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

I thought I was the only one.

Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.

ashkankiani 5 hours ago

I got a third party replacement battery in my iPhone. The battery works just fine and the reason is simple, I no longer live in the US, where the phone was purchased, and if I want to keep my 2 eSIM slots, then I can't get the phone fixed in Hong Kong. Anyone who thinks Apple is very convenient has never lived in multiple countries, imo.

But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).

But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.

steelframe 2 hours ago

My daughter recently left me with her old M1 Macbook Air when she went to college. I decided to give Fedora Asahi Remix a try. It was great seeing that the install process was a simple "pipe curl to sh" from a domain I suppose I have to trust anyway. The most technical part of the install was making sure I waited long enough for the machine to shut down and then holding the power button until "Loading startup options…” appeared on the screen, popping in my local macOS username/password a handful of times along the way while the scripts did their thing.

To be fair, I did in fact get a "Donate to GNOME" interstitial shortly after I first logged in. My agent was able to disable that without too much trouble. I find it obnoxious that GNOME gets to grab my attention for a donation just because they control my UI, while the thousands of other developers who wrote key parts of my OS don't get the same privilege.

That aside, I'm absolutely thrilled with the combination of Apple hardware and Linux software. I can see this being my default "mobile device with a keyboard." It doesn't yet work with my external display, but rumor has it the folks at Asahi having been making strides on that this year. Until then my Framework and Thinkpad both have some more utility as workhorse machines.

I suppose M2 is the most recent platform that has "good enough" Linux support from Asahi, but my M1 fits the bill for most everything I want to do on a mobile device with an attached keyboard. I might pick up an M3 with 24GB to replace it at some point if the Asahi team can get external monitors, GPU acceleration, and sleep working well on that chip.

FlowingRiver an hour ago

Said it for a long time. My biggest problem with Apple hardware is the software.

Things like Asahi fix that.

kstrauser 6 hours ago

Whenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them.

They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.

[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html

[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck

onemoresoop 4 hours ago

They don’t care and will likely make your review hard to get to.

bigyabai 3 hours ago

Apple doesn't care. Most people ignore the ads, which is why Apple can keep adding them to first-party apps without pushback. Rage-protesting ad campaigns probably pumps the Apple ads KPIs.

There will never be a mea culpa from Apple because this has long been their end goal. Tim Cook made it extremely clear that services would be an internal pivot for Apple. It's a lifeline for their quarterly reports, a neverending frontier of captive users that all pay a premium to participate in status games. Apple customers might be the most lucrative advertising audience in the world, all Apple has to do is "protect" them from the bad advertisements and expose curated, trusted promotions that Apple users are sure to love. Then they sell it as part of the trust ecosystem, so that anyone questioning the value of advertisements gets called a malcontent that wants to force Apple users into an wild-west maelstrom of disrespectful, uncurated ads.

This sort of false equivocation "oh-we-can't-fix-it" attitude is how Apple kept their App Store monopoly, and it's how they continue to deny ecosystem integration to respectful alternative software. It's an insult to capable users and the core reason why I had to leave the ecosystem. There is no reason to pay a price premium versus Microsoft if my OEM begs me to Try the new Safari! or Get Three Months of <garbage you don't want> for FREE! My blood pressure goes up just remembering the stupid shit that Microsoft and Apple imposed onto "my" computer.

cheesecakegood 3 hours ago

I mean, News is a collection of newspapers who pretty famously have supported themselves via advertising basically since forever, so complaining about ads in News to me is like complaining that a hamburger combo on a fast food menu includes soda. If you read the news, you get ads is a pretty normal social contract.

bigyabai 3 hours ago

Sure, and the App Store is traditionally a place where advertisements appear above top search results. That's a normalized social contract, and it fucking sucks. It's a deliberately misleading design pattern that prioritizes ad sales over user clarity and immediacy. iTunes and Quicktime were never half as scummy as their modern counterparts are.

If you continue down this road of legitimizing user-hostile design, you will sacrifice everything you love about Apple. It's a Procrustean bed upon which good apps are hammered into service revenue.

californical 7 hours ago

Yep, after being a huge Apple Maps advocate for years to family and friends, I have quit it completely after I got a pop up introducing new ads.

Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.

If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…

a34729t 6 hours ago

I just installed Google maps after 4 years and man it is shitty with cosntant recommendations and nags too. I just want a map and search and directions. But Apple maps is sooooo shitty at those...

al_borland 5 hours ago

I find Apple is better at turn-by-turn navigation, while Google is better at business and POI data. I will usually look stuff up on Google Maps, but use Apple Maps in the car for navigation. Google's navigation is (last I used it) bad at telling me what's next. I'll turn, it will say nothing, then wait until I'm right on top of something to tell me to do it... I find it stressful.

I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.

californical 5 hours ago

CoMaps works really well as a wrapper of OpenStreetMaps. It even has seemingly-accurate hours for a few businesses near me! And if you are willing to dig into accessibility settings on the iPhone you can choose a good quality voice for navigation.

But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that

asdff 5 hours ago

I never noticed that with google myself. I will say between apple maps and google maps that google maps is far more accurate for traffic estimates. You may be tempted to go with apple maps sitting them side by side when apple says its 6 mins faster than google. That is not apple maps finding some magic route. That is apple maps being dumb.

qwerpy 6 hours ago

My unpleasant introduction to Apple Maps ads recently was opening it to look for nearby restaurants, and seeing an ad for a domestic violence lawyer nearby. Apple has now lost all credibility when it comes to respecting the user, not that they had much left at this point.

joquarky 4 hours ago

What I don't understand is that all of our data is being gathered everywhere for decades now, but the ads are still not targeted with any degree of precision.

xinan 4 hours ago

Ironically: https://imgur.com/a/xHyiUzW

shaftway 15 minutes ago

"We estimate we can sell up to 80% of an individual's visual field, before inducing seizures"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpPE85Jogjw&t=17s

karmakurtisaani 7 hours ago

It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation requires more growth, and they're out of good ideas.

bigyabai 6 hours ago

Look at any recent Apple revenue breakdown. If you pretend that the iPhone doesn't exist, Apple's most profitable market segment is services. Even the iPad and Mac can't dethrone it.

According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.

hylaride 17 minutes ago

Apple Music’s margins are probably not that great. It does have to pay licensing fees, but everything else? Maybe…

m463 3 hours ago

It's like the business model of "make and sell things" has died in my lifetime.

rustcleaner an hour ago

GrapheneOS + Neo Store + FFUpdater + Aurora Store do not eyerape you with ads. Just some food for thought and consideration.

OSMAnd~ for maps, SimpleX + Orbot (and VPN for calls) for secure telecommunication, JRPN 15C & 16C for calculator, Collabora Office for spreadsheets, BravePipe (or NewPipe) for YouTube client, Silence for automatic call rejection (reject all callers not in your contacts for example, and regex/rules-based), ... need I go on?

bm3719 7 hours ago

My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).

With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.

Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.

CodingJeebus 7 hours ago

I want (and plan) to have a flip phone one day, but work necessitates that I have a mobile OS that can support things like MFA, unfortunately.

BoxOfRain 7 hours ago

You might want to check out the Bigme HiBreak phones, they're basically low-mid Android phones with e-ink screens. They work perfectly well for the dull functional things expected of a phone, while rendering all the addictive and spammy patterns pretty ineffective. I've found my one very useful as an intermediate step between a dumbphone and a traditional smartphone.

thoughtpalette 7 hours ago

I tried out dumb.co. Their flip phone supports maps, MFA, Uber, imessage/call forwarding.

I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.

asdff 5 hours ago

Why though? I mean you can use your 13 mini like that and just delete everything but those couple apps you actually need.

asdff 5 hours ago

Why do you need a flip phone though? Just use your smartphone as you would a flip phone. Don't install ticktok. Problem solved.

rustcleaner 33 minutes ago

>My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience.

Same with my GrapheneOS phone. FOSS is a jewel to be treasured!

As for ads permeating our spaces, I think it's high time to implement strict ad control; the only place you should see ads is in the Yellow Pages, as listings. No more billboards, backs of receipts, outsides of shopping bags, not in newspapers (except classifieds) or magazines, not on websites, not on entertainment feeds, or anywhere else besides going to a directory and searching for a specific class of service or product. Also directories (stores included) must permit ordering by distance (strict, no algorithm foolery), cost, review count, average reviews, number of sales, and other criteria based on the data they collect; it should be as simple and reliable as sorting in LibreOffice Calc, with zero sponsored manipulation to advantage sponsors in the listings.

You'll go out of business without such Tom-foolery? Great! Your business isn't viable and is frankly a joke; go provide some real value instead you leech!

apparent 7 hours ago

It's lousy that you can't turn off the badge notifications for the Settings app, which is where they push this garbage. I'm still on iOS 18, and I just have to live with a red '1' on my Settings app because I haven't updated my OS. It also pokes me every week or two to update.

It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.

cillian64 7 hours ago

You could move the settings app to a less-used home-screen page, or you can remove the settings icon from the home screen entirely.

It's mildly annoying to have to do the swipe-down-and-search to get to settings but it's not an app I use all that often.

apparent 5 hours ago

Yeah, I've not pulled the trigger on this yet. I assume I'll get a new phone before too long and then will be forced to use the current OS.

threecheese 4 hours ago

And the b0rked that with the new Siri - I had to turn Siri off today because I literally couldn't get to an app unless I knew its location on the Home Screen.

rjh29 7 hours ago

That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.

molind 6 hours ago

Funny to read claims like that on techradar, that showed multiple pop-up frames around the 'article' and on top of it. But they haven't added an image of that 'ads'. No you have to read and try to understand what happened.

cortesoft 6 hours ago

Yep, I had trouble reading this article because it was entirely covered in ads.

asdff 5 hours ago

Using the internet without an adblocker is like refusing to use a condom

catlikesshrimp 6 hours ago

You can use ublockorigin on firefox to solve the problem. You can do nothing about system ads on iphone

etothet 6 hours ago

I thought the exact same thing. Of course, a key difference is that those of us who choose to pay for an iPhone, use iOS, and often pay for additional services are already giving Apple our money. They're trying to extract more and more from us and it's honestly insulting. I give techradar credit for providing us their user-hostile experience for free.

VCFundedGenYer 6 hours ago

You are free to use an adblocker or the "reader" view in your browser.

This is a solved problem and you are not utilizing the solutions.

testing22321 6 hours ago

Tech radar has to keep the lights on somehow because they’re giving the article away for free.

Apple you paid a lot of money to already.

paradox460 6 hours ago

They've had ads for years. Try not upgrading to Tahoe and you'll get a popup every week advertising their new os

testing22321 6 hours ago

I set a do not disturb that runs 24x7 to turn that off

VCFundedGenYer 6 hours ago

Their damn hardware is so expensive, they should never pass an iota of a thought about putting ads in their software.

hurfdurf 12 minutes ago

John Ternus says Apple has 'so much' opportunity to expand services | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924814 | https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/27/john-ternus-says-apple-has-so...

Ternus to potentially squeeze more out of App Store | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589193 | https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/09/06/gurman-schiller...

(Apple put "Ads" under the "Services"-umbrella)

masonwan an hour ago

I thought Apple could sell us privacy as feature because they don't sell ads .

I guess Apple is shooting their foot by selling their user data for ads because of money.

Betrayal?

clcaev 8 hours ago

What are the free software alternative phones/tablets and how do we concentrate our support so at least one of them is successful?

toomuchtodo 7 hours ago

Reach out to Fulu, this should be a project.

https://www.fulu.org/contact-us

dathinab 7 hours ago

best bet is currently GrapheneOS and that is still Adroid and will likely have to fight an up-hill battle in coming years

there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible

but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.

The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.

skoopsy 7 hours ago

The title had me thinking they had actual adverts open to advertisers. It's not, just someone winging about apple advertising icloud+ and some other stuff in their settings app where you can directly enable it. Come on you lot, this is fine, it's like the least ad driven mainstream commercial platform.

reddalo 7 hours ago

They show a notification for that, which is super annoying.

wat10000 6 hours ago

The least crap of the crap is not a laudable position. I’m a big Apple fan but they need to stop this shit with advertising. The amount of advertising built in to a $1,000+ device, including ads for the device maker’s own services, should be exactly zero.

baggachipz 6 hours ago

Apple Maps now has ads... er, sorry, "preferred listings".

wiseowise 4 hours ago

No, it’s not fine.

busymom0 37 minutes ago

The App Store app is filled with ads. The search in particular shows 2 full screen height ads now before results.

visiondude 6 hours ago

for the first time in many years it’s these ads that have me looking at Android devices seriously. it’s the fact that they can’t be easily dismissed that bothers me the most (although clearly annoying even if they were quick to dismiss)

post_break 4 hours ago

I'll never forget when an employee at Samsung asked on their internal chat why the built in Weather app has ads, and they turned them off. https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-remove-ads-2735914/

gniv 4 hours ago

Ads on Maps were inevitable. Google does it too. Those services just cost a ton of money to run. (I know the article talks about other ads too.)

wffurr 4 hours ago

Maybe they're trying to train people to be OK with the red notification badge and just accept unread notifications as part of life.

gwbas1c 4 hours ago

Decent companies listen: I suggest contacting support; if enough people do it they might realize the errors in their ways.

I had a similar experience with promotional notifications from Hyundai: I suspect I'm not the only person who called their support saying, "I don't want ads from a $70,000 car."

busymom0 40 minutes ago

Today, I emailed Craig Federighi about the ads in App Store search results as well as Apple Intelligence models eating up 30 GB on my Mac mini despite it being turned off.

Let's see if anyone listens.

jsiepkes 2 hours ago

Google does this as well with Google Workspace with administrators. It's super annoying.

fzeindl 7 hours ago

I really don’t get this. Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons that are really beneficial and great products that make sense.

I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.

But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.

AFAIK you can click them away.

It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.

dumbmrblah 7 hours ago

I have a subscription to Apple+, 2 TB, $40 month plan.

I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?

asdff 5 hours ago

$40 for only 2tb? Extortion.

dumbmrblah 4 hours ago

Nah - Music, TV, Fitness etc all included. All shared with the family (and extended family) so it doesn't have the friction of piecemealing it all together, which I value more than anything.

SOTGO 6 hours ago

From the article, many users report being unable to disable them:

> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."

> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.

There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."

Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.

bigyabai 6 hours ago

> Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons

That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.

zamadatix 5 hours ago

I've tried clicking them away and they keep coming back. E.g. my current watch is about to hit a year old and doesn't have Apple Care. I clicked away anything about the Apple Card in Wallet and I just had it sitting right at the top when I was trying to get to my boarding pass last week. I have no idea why it keeps telling me about Apple Fitness or Apple Music each time I purchase a new device, I was aware of it the last 6 times it tried to push those.

I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.

nodamage 5 hours ago

People are being intentionally obtuse in order to find something to get mad about.

Obviously offering add-ons to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.

Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.

If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.

xavdid 5 hours ago

Yeah I feel like this is the nuance that gets lost.

I hate ads, but mentioning other first party services feels very different than selling parts of the system UI like a billboard.

These service upsells should be dismissible but they seem fairly inoffensive. The App Store ads, on the other hand, are just atrocious