Those stupid effing TurboTax ads are the only time I’ve ever been motivated to actually write feedback to apple about a feature. So aggravating and user-hostile.

The first few times the App Store opened to TurboTax while scrolling past, I assumed it was my fault and I was somehow misclicking. Then I slowed down and confirmed, no, this is the intended behavior. It’s meant to pop up and disturb your reading.

What slimy behavior. And the fact that it’s TurboTax of all companies they’re doing it for is just salt on the wound.

Serious question, how/why do you keep using an app that behaves like this?

I subscribed to Apple One for a period of time and tried to use News+. Even when paying, it seems like most of the article were behind a paywall. That, plus the ads, I didn’t understand what I was paying for. I can have a much better user experience with RSS.

> Somehow, he or she was still convinced and put it up.

It is intentional. People who will not notice, are the least likely to complain later.

Do you know why all these “Nigerian prince” emails are of a very specific style?

I'm genuinely haunted by these TurboTax ads, I see that download app popup at least 3 times a day when I use Apple News. Truly cannot believe someone at Apple though that was an acceptable user experience for ads.

Because the sets of people who would give money to this and people who notice the Gemini logo are disjoint.

I would be willing to consider paying for vetted ads - in other words, you pay for the NYT and you get a guarantee that you're only seeing ads that have been personally vetted by the NYT for correctness, appropriateness, etc.

Advertising is speech and it used to be that if a magazine/newspaper printed a scam ad, it was horribly damaging to their business, both legally and morally.

They also bought and killed texture, a fantastic cross-platform magazine subscription service, to somehow further Apple News. I subscribed to Texture on Android. I wouldn't give a dollar to Apple News even if I was in the Apple ecosystem.

FYI it would be "Icing on the cake" or "cherry on top"

For Apple to really win this space I believe they would need to release a cross platform Publisher tool and complete in the AMP space. Some kind of magazine design / web design software that publishes articles to a standard format and applies a layout over the top. Then the News app becomes a renderer/aggregator that does things better than the standard web browser.

I like using it to listen to narrated versions of New Yorker articles.

Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.

And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.

Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.

It's not a revenue generating service.

There’s plenty of scams on HN, people don’t notice the successful ones

Ever since Apple moved to Services Strategy in 2014 it has been like this. Services were not there so they could provide a better experience for its "customers". I use the word "customer" here which is what Apple / Steve Jobs used to call their loyal fans, and not user. But to further growth their Revenue pie because they foresee iPhone one day will stagnant.

You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.

Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.

In fairness Apple did come up with a custom JSON format for articles:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat

The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow.

They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers.

I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.

At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint.

It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook.

SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after.

Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined.

It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely.

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

Contrast with Apple TV+ which has insanely high quality shows. I feel like they arent advertising it enough and investing in it enough. One of my favorite shows that my daughter watches is on Apple TV+ the other on Amazon (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie).

Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.

Why can't they build their own ad network for control instead of partnering with 3rd parties?

Generally if all the ads you see are scammy, it means you probably are using some form of tracking/privacy protection.

When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots. When they don't really know who you are, only bottom feeders bid on the ad slots you see.

In a way, it almost acts as retribution for not submitting to the anti-privacy machine.

> We should assume that all ads in general are scams. The noise to signal ratio is too large to care.

Completely agree.

> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.

There is no evidence that HN is not being actively astroturfed though. Sadly community filtering cannot replace trust in individuals.

The only way out of this is to make ad platforms liable for scam ads. At the moment it's simply too profitable to print lies.

It actually says "L am retiring". Maybe a 419 scam kinda thing, the intentional typos.

You're famous now. The author noticed your comment and updated the article pointing it out.

It's even on the base install of Windows Server. Fuck off Microsoft.

They tried to kill _competitors'_ ads. Everyone else gets "Ask Not to Track" while Apple gets "Personalized Ads." It's so glaring once you see it.

As someone who owns zero apple hardware, I feel like Apple TV (the service) is probably the most consistent producer of high quality TV shows.

I actually like Fitness+, it got me working out for the first time in my life.

Apple Arcade is pretty good, I imagine it's good for parents that want to make sure their kids are playing actually decent games instead of whatever slop you find on the app store or roblox

Against Youtube Music and Spotify, Apple Music rates quite well, at least IMO.

"The only people who call customers 'users' are drug dealers and software companies."

Yes on the last count for Apple U.

The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences.

People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.

I'd say the inflexion point was in 2015. That's when Apple Music launched, sidelining the iTunes store where you could buy songs, in favor of a rental model like Spotify. That's also when they discontinued the Mac Server hardware and ceded the enterprise software market to Microsoft and Adobe.

Since then it's been on a nonstop drive to jam as many subscriptions services into the iOS ecosystem as possible.

>At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

The simple answer would be when SJ passed away. The long answer is there wasn't a turning point, but a long period of cultural shift, due to Tim Cook being CEO.

Tim Cook not immediately taking a CEO stand and left a power vacuum was a mistake. He said himself he thought everything would continue as normal, which obviously did not happen. Firing Scott Forstall was a mistake. Ive taking over software design was a mistake. Not listening to the advice of Katie Cotton and manage a new PR direction was a mistake. Following Phill Schiller advice of firing long time Marketing Firm for Apple was a mistake. Tim Cook not understanding his weakness which is his judgement of character was a big big mistakes, as it leads to Dixon CEO and Burberry CEO taking helms of Apple Retail, ultimately stoping if not reversed the momentum of Apple Retails improvement and expansion by 10 years. Giving Ive the power to play around with Retail Design because Apple Retail Store is somehow a "social place" was a big mistake. Prioritising Operational and Supply Chain Decisions over Design was a mistake after around iPhone 8 Plus. Too focused on sales metric and bottom line was a big mistake. Shifting to Services Revenue, which should have been AppleCare, iCloud or even iPhone Subscription model, instead they got Apple TV+, in my option is a mistake. They were too scared to hurt the relationship with Carriers. Eddy Cue taking over a lot of decisions? Apple going to Davos? Merging of different iOS and macOS team where it used to be teams per product but later became functions per team structure. Trusting China and didn't diversify their production when Trump was first time in Office. ( They said they will but they didn't. Literally every single media lied on behalf of Apple ). I mean the list goes on and on.

I really like someone on HN said about Apple. Ever since Steve Jobs passed away Apple has been left on auto pilot mode for most of its time.

Apple does have their own ad network. This is their ad network.

https://ads.apple.com/

A clear difference here is that Apple creates the TV+ shows and they don't create the News+ content. And I really don't think they want to get into the news content creation business.

Any ad provider that is going to serve up scams to anyone is an ad provider I don’t trust. Giving more information to an untrustworthy company seems like a losing plan. Those more target ads also mean more effective manipulation to get people to buy things they likely don’t need.

> Word of mouth and maybe trusted communities like HN is the only way to reliably discover new things.

Any sufficiently trusted (online) community will find many attempts to exploit its trust for profit.

That, unfortunately has pushed advertisers into guerrilla marketing tactics like posts and comments disguised as genuine user behaviour. It means we now need to parse whether what we're looking at is an ad or not.

Maybe they would have done that anyway though.

I can't say the AI scripted AI voiced "my wife bet my abs vs. a trip to Paris" and "I ordered this and was going to throw it away but then the heavens opened and angels descended and gave me this Alibaba tchotchke" are harbingers of the idiocracy. Because it's already here.

// Adblock at DNS used to kill these Apple News ads. They're no longer suppressed. Free with their Plus all the things and aggregated my content subs but I quit using it. Had loved Texture, this now sucks.

> maybe trusted communities like HN

Emphasis on maybe. HN is large enough that scammers will try to slip in. The moderation mechanisms probably catch a lot of it but not all.

My trust in anything online or in an app is very low and must be earned.

Yes. Facebook is especially bad about letting outright scammers buy ad slots.

> It works because everyone in the game has something to gain from it

It's reminiscent of triangulation fraud in that regard. The incentive is for everyone involved to keep their mouths shut because you buy something for below-market prices on sites like eBay, the "seller" places orders using stolen credit and debit cards with legitimate retailers, and the product ships directly to you. Everyone wins...as long as the account holder doesn't pay attention to their statements.

What's annoying is they do have tons of scam detection crap, which seems to only trigger on legitimate advertising (insofar as any advertising is legitimate) - the problem is there are millions of people willing to work on getting scams through for pennies a day, and it doesn't cost them anything.

Of all the ways to treat the cancer that is advertising, I think encouraging stricter moderation by the payment providers is the one with the scariest side effects.

I'm old enough to consider TV ads as scams too. "For only 6 payments of 19.99!" The "mute" button on my parents' remote control was worn off. I still mute ads that I get through low-tier streaming subscriptions. It's really jarring to go to a friend's house where they don't mute their ads.

Heck, I've even seen scam ads in printed local newspapers. They typically target seniors with a thing for collecting rare coins and use misleading language about the U.S. Mint.

I am surprised you could look at that page and expect to receive a quality product. The images all look like really low grade AI-generated renderings. The mug in the cupholder and the giftbox image in particular don't stand up to even casual scrutiny.

Not trying to make your situation worse, I just find it interesting what these sites are able to get away with to get people to part with their money.

Maggie Mcguagh on Instagram's whole schtick is buying and reviewing these fake AI generated products. Its pretty hilarious

[1]https://www.instagram.com/maggiemcgaugh

Just as there's a cottage industry for "I made the game the scam ads show" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRDhiN50Vo0 I think there will soon be a cottage industry for "the scam ad was good, let's make it for real".

That mug is amusing but it should't be too hard for China to make something similar - but real (at least without the weird piston).

Wtf. How could you fall for such an obvious scam? Are you under 5 years old? Or over 60?

I am very curious what the product really looked like.

so you're saying this is a real product and the ad you saw(then purchased from) was a fake?

The era of Tim Apple is definitely different from Jobs; had he seen an ad like that he'd have fired half the company.

But management by metrics means line go up? All is good.

I'm pretty sure the only ad that would work on me would be an ad for an indie game, but indie game developers don't buy ads, they buy blue checkmarks on twitter then they try to game the algorithm. Even if I did see an ad for an indie game, I would probably not click on it, but just google its name instead.

What I mean to say is that there is a type of person that will never click on an ad, even if they want to buy the product. Worse yet, most of the time I do click on an ad, it's a misclick.

But I don't see this as a failure of the ad industry. I just think I'm the edge case.

On top of that, that thing takes a bunch of fiddling in their own GUI to disable. I want a search bar for my home page. Nothing else. Then every once and awhile it will 'forget' its settings and put it all back. Edge/Chrome makes no difference to me it is the same code. But that first tab experience with edge is garbage. Probably why I mostly use Firefox still.

Fitness+ is actually super high quality, really well integrated with Apple’s products, and fun to use. I love it. I would happily pay the monthly Apple fee just for fitness+. I hope they don’t change it.

If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.

TV is pretty good even for my English sensibilities. Severance is some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

"customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better.

"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.

It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.

It’s almost like Google AMP was a good idea and solving this problem this community had a melt down over it.

It's definitely that publishers don't want it.

This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.

Steve Jobs was all about the customer experience, hence so many of his famous quotes. Two like the most are:

- Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products

- His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation.

He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it.

As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet.

Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days.

To be honest, I'm not sure if you can entirely blame Cook. Ever since the 2010s, it's felt like capitalism has reached an endstage culture, where it is no longer about an equilibrium between best product for lowest price vs minimum product for highest price, but instead just maximizing shareholder value at the cost of the customer, the workers, the business itself, the environment and what have you.

> At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

This hardly an original sentiment, but when Steve Jobs died. Jobs was not perfect, but he believed they were there to make great products, had good taste with obsessive attention to detail, and was pretty much omnipotent in the company. I'm sure there are people with many of these traits in Apple, but not all of them together.

Their first new hardware release was the Apple Watch, which is a confused product, with too many functions on launch, and a poorly thought out two button + scroll wheel + touch screen interface (I still don't really know which button does which). And don't get me started on that ridiculous solid gold version.

You can still see the old Apple in there (look at their hardware!), but it's fragmented and not all pulling in the same direction.

Old Apple had a productive tension between Jony Ive and Scott Forestall on which direction to go in with design, with Steve Jobs as a tie-breaker.

After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.

Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.

That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

I consider even "legitimate" ads scams. My products are more expensive (the marketing budget doesn't fall out of the sky, after all), and I am rewarded by being forced to view extremely annoying content in my day-to-day life? As a consumer, that sounds like a horrible deal to me!

On top of that, most ads provide no value whatsoever. Take the classic Coca-Cola vs Pepsi: they are fishing from the same pool so ads are primarily going to steal customers away from the other brand. Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing, so the ads are a net negative for society.

There is also of course advertising in order to inform your potential market that your product exists at all. But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already? And if two products seem to have the same features for the same price, the one which isn't heavily advertised is probably the better choice: it is likely already more popular for a reason, and there's a decent possibility that the money they aren't spending on advertising is going towards useful things like quality and customer support.

I completely understand why companies in a heavily capitalist society are spending money on ads, but you can't convince me that the world wouldn't be a more pleasant place without them.

> When an ad network has a strong profile on you, legitimate companies pay good money for those ad slots.

I have looked what interests for example Google stores about me

> http://google.com/ads/preferences

I am very certain that these don't describe me well, or I am classified wrong in some categories (without using any tracking/privacy protection! But I won't actively correct this misclassification).

My experience is rather that some people have very niche interests (among hacker-minded people, the proportion of these people is in my experience much higher than in the general population), and are hard to target using ads, so advertising networks and companies don't make the effort to target these users.

Also, when I google about prices for some product category, I often have other reasons than a buying wish. For example I recently googled about the prices of products in some category because some work colleague claimed that someone else bought a product of a specific vendor for a specific price, but I really felt that the claimed price was off; to substantiate my claims, I did some googling.

Or I google about products in a specific category because I am exactly not satisfied with what some established players that love to advertise have to offer.

Apple stocks app has a similar obnoxious pattern. It’s a genius UX. Why is this stock up/down today? Conveniently a bunch of articles are displayed that explain it. But there’s no way to block news sources that are paywalled. But there was a workaround in which you could individually block each news source. But then Apple gave themselves a way out. If “Apple editors” choose to highlight an article then you’ll be forced to see it regardless of your preferences. Coincidentally they do love to highlight paywalled articles.

I attempted to find a stocks app replacement but nothing else has such a slick interface and wasn’t also crammed full of ads.

Are you saying that something about this product is suspect? But it has "Beautiful Craftsamnship"!

https://img-va.myshopline.com/image/store/1731468034215/1dd4...

Yeah it was always a trick scammers used. Scam emails (the more obvious ones - not sophisticated phising) always had typos or subtle grammar errors because authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes. It's the people that do not read thoroughly that are much more likely to fall for a scam.

I would imagine it might be the same with those ads.

Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.

Whether you're filtering it, or it's subconsciously working is a bit hard to say. Plenty of people think they're 'immune' to advertising - but the goal is often very simple. Just putting the name of a brand in your head can pay off months or years later when going to buy something. That associating of X brand with Y product is already there, even if you've long forgotten the source.

Same here. What's worse is that some pages "highlight" content in a similar fashion to an ad in the middle and I'm a bit unaware of that content. Only when something doesn't add up I'll scroll back and see the missing content.

For me, it depends on how well-disguised the ad is. Ads quietly sitting there, informing? Those I blank out. The big flashy animations? Those make me switch to reader mode, or leave the domain entirely.

I do sometimes find I'm accidentally clicking on the ads at the top of search engine results, though for this case it's extra ironic as the ad is for the real thing I'm searching for which is 2 results further down the list, and I only realise I clicked on an ad when the link goes via an ad-tracking domain that I block.

I've recently been fooled by an ad in reddit that was pretending to be news, which took me to a fake BBC website. First hint, I also block the BBC domain (nothing wrong with them, it's just a habit I want to get out of given I don't live in the UK any more).

I think a lot of people who grew up on the early web have that reflex

Yea I'm with you there. I honestly don't even see ads. Even YouTube ads that start playing, my brain switches off till I can skip. I also don't read the news at all anywhere, so that helps.

Commercials in TV+ are as bad as ads in News+, e.g. it seems I cannot open the app without getting blasted at with a Peacock commercial.

TV productions are a product, not a service. Apple TV is the service.

"user" feels quite descriptive and neutral to me. It's a person that uses the device they own or are given access to. That's it.

I'm the (super-)user of my Linux PC. I have total ownership and control over it.

Arguably "customer" makes the business relation to the provider of a service/device clearer.

The term I hate with a burning passion is "consumer".

> Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements

did you have a specific example in mind? It seems that the price of the hardware generally stays the same from year to year.

for example, from iphone 3g to iphone 6s was $199. and iphone 12 through today's iphone 17 is $799. I think the change in the middle was due dropping carrier subsidies and going to full-screen with face id.

This is a common trajectory for companies. The first CEO (founder) paves a vision, the second CEO grows the firm profitably, the third CEO is usually a wall street hire on a mandate to massage the stock price.

To be fair, while Jobs was at the helm apple was a fraction of it's market cap and iPhone adoption was still rapidly rising around the globe.

The 10000ft perspective on AMP was correct, the lived reality was awful. And the technical implementation used can't be divorced from everything that surrounded it: Google's place in the industry with regard to search engines, ads, etc.

In this specific example there is a very big difference between producing a format for use in a first-party app vs trying to replace standards for content used across the web.

I can't imagine it's a great deal for publishers. It's probably why NYT, Economist and other prestige publications aren't on it. (Save for Atlantic, New Yorker). I. Assuming they use the Spotify model ( paying commissions on articles per reader)?

In my case I was kinda OK with Google ads until around 2010 and IIRC only began blocking them actively after they had been feeding me trash ads for years.

Maybe you are right in most cases and I was the victim of a fluke.

But from what I have seen from Google after that I don't think so.

Facebook however, a company I disliked then and dislike now are scary good with their ads and have often been even even when I actively tried to avoid them.

All this to say that your theory sounds interesting but I am convinced it is far from the whole story.

Having a strong profile makes one vulnerable to more convincing scams, which is much more dangerous.

Alternative POV: the better they profile, you the better they can slip the scams past your defenses

HN has been overwhelmingly astroturfed since at least 2010.

The "ever changing/enshittifying Edge" was the final nail in the coffin on Windows for me...that made me to change to MacOS for good.

I just use “New Tab Redirect” in Chrome so I can make new tabs default to google.com. The home page only applies to the initial browser window/tab. It’s pretty silly.

I do not have that filter, but I have been using ad blockers for so long that my tolerance for ads is near zero. Being interrupted by an ad is enough for me to close the tab or turn the device off.

I can't imagine what it's like to access modern websites unfiltered.

Possibly an instance of banner blindness

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

Gamecopyworld… now there’s a name I have not heard in a long time.

I feel the same though. My only complaint when Adblockers fail is that I have to scroll so much to read some articles on some sites. Sure, there may be some level of subconscious registration occurring in my brain for maybe the company logo, but it’s usually minimal.

Who doesn't think this about themselves. It's like when people say they're immune to propaganda. Isn't this thinking what makes people think their smart devices are listening to conversations rather than targeted ads you only notice after it's had the effect on you.

Fitness+ is okay-ish but it’s not getting any attention and I don’t think it deserves its $10/month price. Non-Apple fitness subscriptions at the same price are far better.

Just for starters, what if you have two people in the house who want to do a Fitness+ workout together? Too bad: even if they both pay for it, one gets the nice tracking and HUD and the other gets squat. This is an obvious and trivial feature, and it’s nowhere to be found. I could maybe see it getting cut for the launch checklist if people were behind schedule, but Fitness+ plus is more than five years old now, there is no excuse.

It’s total abandonware from a company trying to do the absolute minimum to get your recurring subscription.

> "It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create."

You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use").

People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not.

Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free.

People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.

I agree that “customer” is a better term. I’m not sure I agree with the rest of the rationale.

In my mind, “user” stated to take over when we started having web based services that were used by people, but they were the ones paying. For example, Google and Facebook. Both got paid through ads, so they advertisers were the customers. The “users” were just the eyeballs the advertisers wanted to reach. So, you had to make your service compelling enough for someone to use for long enough that they’d see enough ads to make it profitable to provide the service.

It’s more akin to talking about “viewers” or “viewership” when talking about more traditional media.

For Apple, they are generally looking to get paid by the ultimate consumer of the product. So to them, we are the customers.

AMP was a good technical solution for a short window of time, deliberately tanked by confusing/centralized stewardship.

They kept opening it more and more but by then it was too late.

It’s funny when people don’t understand what they are saying like you.

The watch was not only eventually a mega hit, it was an Ive/jobs idea.

Literally everything you are saying is wrong.

This sounds brilliant, makes too much sense, and suggests a new kind of ad blocker to escalate and reflect retribution back.

Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.

Why would a less legitimate company not pay more money to give you a worse deal with better margins? The intuitive dynamics to me would be that any way to trick consumers will be applied, and the bulk of the resulting spread will be captured by the ad companies via their auction systems. So we all get worse products with worse deals, and the difference goes into spying on people and convincing them to become more consumptive, i.e. to turn them into worse versions of themselves.

Never allow ads in your life. They're malicious in every way.

Pre LLMs I would have said the all-text format of HN probably kept the astroturfing low, but these days I'm less sure. It's still a much less engaging format than almost any other place on the web, although again, with LLMs you can even cheaply target the lowest value returns.

Yep, one of the big problems is the penalty for any corporate crime today is not enough. Often the crime is more profitable than the penalty hurts.

If you want to fix ads, make a malicious ad cost the ad network triple the amount they got paid to display it. Corporations are psychopathic by design, if you want to fix them you need to make it an actual financial risk to do something bad.

And then heck, if you want to make stopping the original bad actors more effective, make the platforms pay up those damages but empower them to recover that loss if they can get it from the malicious advertiser.

You'll see platforms doing more vetting of content, doing more KYC, and focused on reducing their own risk.

No there is another way. We can ban advertising completely.

Every now and then there's a post on Reddit like "I ordered this thing from UNARFI and it is nothing like the pictures" and I'm like, what do you expect when ordering from a site named after an incorrect guess on wordle?

Very witty

I dunno, I think that multiple people doing a workout together in the same at-home room is a bit of an edge case for this app. I have a not-tiny house, and I don't have a space where I could do that without having to move heavy furniture around first. People who live in apartments are really out of luck.

They do support syncing up the workouts of people who're each using their own device: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101979

I think you would use SharePlay for that maybe

> It’s total abandonware from a company trying to do the absolute minimum to get your recurring subscription.

What? Abandonware? They are constantly posting new workouts that are thought out and well produced. The Fitness+ app is very well maintained. It works great. It has cool features. Honestly I don't know what you are talking about, here.

I've worked out together with one to three other people several times. No one cared that their heart rate wasn't shown on the screen. It's really not an important feature and a very niche use case.

"And don't say 'do it' because i don't 'do it', i ingest it, on orders from my neurophysiologist."

No it wasn't. It was a tool to attempt to keep people on Google's surface area rather than freeing them to browse the web as the web was intended.

The Apple Watch was launched as a confused product. Go watch the original Apple Watch launch announcement. Basically none of it landed with consumers. Apple significantly changed their focus within, what, a couple of years? Remember how you could buy a gold one for a truckload of money? Give me a break. Kudos to Apple for managing to change course in less than 5 years, for once, but let’s not pretend the. Apple Watch was a perfect idea passed down from the almighty. It did terribly.

If you think literally everything I'm saying is wrong, you haven't done much of a job of explaining why.

I realise that the watch was probably under development for years before Jobs died. It was, however, released in a half baked state – do you remember what the the original use of the lozenge shaped button was, for example? Things being "hits" is not what's under discussion here, Apple has sold a lot of stuff in the Cook era, no doubt about that. Microsoft has had a lot of hits too, doesn't make their products Old-Apple-like!

I don't know how good Ive is without Jobs. His post-Jobs efforts have been pretty mixed. I'd argue Apple's hardware has improved since he left (although, admittedly through playing it safe, especially with the Mac).

Do you think Apple is in decline when it comes to the quality of their products? Because if you don't we're just talking past each-other.

To Ives credit he tried to do the brand split and focused on Apple Watch as the test bed first with “Edition” then “Hermes”

There just wasn’t the demand.

It might be more pleasant for the people who are able to pay for every website, every magazine, every news source etc. (Maybe. I do discover a lot of things through advertising.) Probably less so for everyone else.

Note: I'm not really super pro-ads, and I've never worked in the advertising industry. I don't like the existing hyper-advertised world we live in.

> Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing

This is an assumption not backed by data. But its pretty much impossible to truly test this hypothesis at any real scale. What data we do have is if many brands stop advertising when they used to do advertising, they tend to start to lose sales. But, as you point out, their competitors didn't necessarily reduce advertising as well, its not testing "what if everyone cut advertising".

> But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already?

Its an assumption these people would have even found the product in the first place, or were willing to give it a try, or even know the product category or type exists in the first place, and that this organic growth would have happened fast enough to keep the product alive. If everyone is basing their decisions off word of mouth, are there really going to be enough people in your network to buck the trend and give a scrappy new competitor a go and have their opinion make decent enough waves?

A world without any advertising at all seems to me to be a place where entrenched names in markets end up dominating based purely on people practically never finding the competitors. They become the default, the go to. This still largely happens in this over-marketed world today though, I do agree, but I think that's more of over-consolidation of producers and distributors having an outsized say on what we see in a lot of physical stores.

That world without any advertising also leads to some things not being made that would have otherwise existed, things that people generally like. Lots of magazines and other publications practically live off some amount of marketing, and they largely exist as a format for people to go see what's happening in a given industry. Lots of things like sports leagues/teams rely on sponsorships. Would there be Formula 1 racing if they didn't have those corporate sponsors?

I do agree especially internet advertising is largely destroying the internet. I don't understand how anyone uses mobile web pages without an ad blocker these days. Its absolutely terrible looking at anyone else's phones that doesn't block the ads, every page is more ad than content. We've definitely gone too far.

Visiting friends/family sometimes I have to ask for the TV to be turned off so we can talk and visit. Not to make some sort of statement or signal my dislike for the content, but to stop having my attention grabbed over and over for useless dribble/ads. They do not understand how horribly distracting it is to someone who isn't numbed to its omnipresence.

I don't think I am immune to propaganda, and definitely not ads. I can't stand ads at all. They immediately grab my attention, even if I make a conscious attempt at ignoring them. It truly feels terrible.

Even for propaganda, I am constantly made aware of my propaganda immunity being subpar for all different kinds of propaganda. Often it's just subtle seeds of propaganda that impact the choice of words that I use to be something different than what I really believe in, and sometimes it is more serious and deeper cases of propagandisation. Very unfortunate, but each time it shows me why I should be critical of everything that I read online.

just made me flashback to a url bar and typing that too long of a url

Thank you! I’ve been searching for a term to describe this type of “ad blindness”.

I’ve also trained myself to recognize and not consume ads anywhere they are not blocked.

"marketing works on you, even if you know how marketing works on you"

Kids today learning about the FTC and standards... we used to be a real country, with real laws that actually helped real people.

> In my mind, “user” stated to take over when we started having web based services that were used by people

Maybe I'm just old, but we've called ... users ... 'user' since Unix or before. Perhaps it is just because Unix was integral to my early computing experience that I see it that way.

> authors don't want to invest time in people that are able to spot such mistakes

This "just-so" story gets repeated constantly in threads about scams, but I've never seen anyone put up any actual proof. The more likely explanation is that scammers are just bad at English since they're predominantly from poor third-world countries.

Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted.

The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions.

For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.

The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".

That link does not work for me. It closes itself immediately.

It’s horrible on mobile. Sites like macobserver are bad. Two videos overlapping, popping in and out, shifting content.

I also use adblock and what ends up happening as a consequence is the ads I do see are the shittiest of shitty ads that don't even come from a recognized network. :)

Bernie Sanders on reversing America's decline

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/feb/05/we-can...

User is definitely a term that long predates the modern SaaS world. And it’s an appropriate term in many cases because even today the customers of a computer hardware or software company are often not the same people using that hardware or software. I am the user of my work computer, but even as a software developer I am certainly not the “customer” of that purchase. My company has requirements as a customer that might be counter to my desires as a user. And likewise I have needs as a user that my company as a customer does not care about (except in so far as having those needs met allows me to do my job)

> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

The idea that the internet couldn't exist without ads is a myth that needs to die. The internet existed, thrived, and was awesome long before it became infested with ads. An ad free internet would be different in some ways, but it'd still be great and filled with endless amounts of content. Your example of youtube kind of proves the point. It was so much more fun before youtube became all about profit and people just posted videos for fun, or out of genuine passion. Not having obnoxious youtube ads doesn't even stop creators from getting paid since they can still take donations or sell merch.

> The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay.

I mean, want is a strong word, but I'm very much okay with paying creators I follow. I have a patreon account with about 22 subscriptions from 1-50 dollars, because what they create enhances my life.

> For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.

First sentence is correct, the second is patently ridiculous. I don't block ads because I think people should work for free: I block ads because every virus I've ever gotten has been delivered to me via an ad network that's not properly vetting what's being pushed to it, and to save incredible amounts of mobile data, and to prevent my phone from getting (as) hot in my hand.

The creator who's page I'm looking at is not even a factor in this calculus. I don't care. If you put up your stuff and are monetizing via ads only and I bounce off that and you earn nothing, oh well. Put it behind a proper paywall then, just, not my problem boss.

> The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".

The Internet, collectively, has been in an abusive relationship with this beast since it's inception. And yeah we got a bunch of free-at-point-of-use services out of it. Okay? I didn't ask Facebook to exist. I didn't request Twitter, I wasn't simply dying of lack of Linked-In. In fact my life would be better if many of these things closed up shop tomorrow and fucked right off.

In time immemorial, it was normal to host VBulletin forums, your own static website, run a BBS, an ICQ server or TeamSpeak server, or whatever for literally nobody. We had no idea if any damn one was reading what we wrote back then, but we wrote anyway because as most people do in one way or another, we felt the drive to create and to share, and then as the internet evolved and the tools became more successful, we built communities, we built forums, we built email lists, all kinds of decentralized, albiet limited, ways to remain in contact with likeminded people.

It was the monoliths who came onto the scene, stuffed to the gills with VC money, who suddenly gave us Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, all the rest of the websites of which there are like 6 now that everything is on. They showed up, and provided free services in exchange for our data. We didn't ask for that, they gave it freely. And now a couple decades on-ish they're finding out that monetizing user data, which has been the go-to excuse for all that time, doesn't really pay the bills and most of them are either losing money or are selling their souls to anyone who will purchase ad space, which is why ads are basically all scams now.

Ad companies have spent the better part of my life digging their own graves and I'm very excited to watch them lay down in them. Rest in piss. The Internet lived before the Platforms, and it will survive them.

>> That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.

> Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

So be it.

It's like someone realizing that their crack dealer is an untrustworthy scumbag who is destroying everything the care about and they need to totally cut ties with him, and a friend objecting "Unfortunately, the 'scumbag' is your crack supplier himself."

Yeah, we know that. If starving the beast means we have to give up our unhealthy addictions, it's probably a side benefit rather than a counter argument.

I think you need to change it to https://, ie, https://google.com/ads/preferences . It resolves to https://myadcenter.google.com/home?hl=en&sasb=true&ref=ad-se...

The App Store really ought to just be a better platform in the first place. Apple is the one that let it accumulate slop, and now they're profiting off it's reputation for gambleslop apps.

note to others: any 3DS can be very easily jailbroken, doesn't require any soldering or sth. https://3ds.hacks.guide/

> HN itself is a massive ad

I don't think it is the same. There is no manipulation involved here and many people seem to be looking for jobs actively.

> no one actually wants to pay

Two things

1. Most content is actually pretty worthless. It's subsidized by the ad-surveillance industrial complex. Even in the pre-LLM times there is so much blogspam, content farm articles, and slop videos because of this.

2. Payment monopolies have made microtransactions uneconomical through fees, which contributes to the friction of paying. I imagine in an alternate world with a crypto or fiat based digital currency with low enough fees, there would be much more direct payments. Seriously, if you just pay one cent per Youtube video, it'd dwarf the ad income for most channels. Your attention is hilariously worthless.

I wouldn't say it's entirely hopeless. Just gotta know who's behind the posts. Checking for conflicts of interest is essential. HN is valuable due the fact many notable hackers post here. Makes it easier to know who we are interacting with, what they stand for and who they work for. Invite only communities like lobsters are even better in that regard. Less random accounts adding noise. Some degree of elitism is a good thing.

Spelling and grammar checkers are free; online translators have been better than that for many years now.

It could be sloppiness, but I think scammers just organically copied efforts that worked, and those were the ones with poor presentations because they pre-filter and so target the scammers efforts more efficiently. The scammers need not be aware of why it works.

Yeah I agree. The point I was trying to make is that you can't judge like the share of some actual collective agreeing to something from reading post on forums.

This is research from Microsoft that goes into more detail: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

If you see any ads at all, then your adblocker isn't aggressive enough. I don't think I have seen a single ad since I installed uBlock Origin, but I also installed s bunch of extra filters first thing I did.

There are really good ad blockers on mobile these days. I use AdGuard for Safari and it's as good as uBlock on desktop Firefox.

I left my iPad deliberately unfiltered to discourage browsing - it's a bedroom device - and it's ridiculously effective. I see a cookie banner with the "legitimate interest" nonsense and I give up.

I skimmed the pdf; they show a model where having such an early "filter" is beneficial to the scammer, but doesn't provide any actual evidence that it applies in reality beyond restating the just-so story.

There is uBlock Origin Lite for Safari: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...