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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

kensegall.com

231–240 of 519 posts

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#231
post #196
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is https://github.com/Prowlarr/Prowlarr

yep: seedbox + this + jeyllfin = unlimited streaming of anything i want for $15/month. no ads, no terrible app UIs, no autoplaying previews, no content getting removed, not having 4 different streaming subscriptions that are hard to cancel, no fuckery at all.

I set this up for my husband who barely knows which end of a PC to use. He's filled up the 4TB media array and now I need more disks (or better retention policies)

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#232
post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it. Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.) Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized. I ended up having to break the DRM becau…

Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now. Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.

For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).

iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#233
post #229

I probably sound like a broken record, but the death of Apple won't come from being behind on AI, from losing developer support, from bad products or services. Fundamentally, it'll be because it is optimising for being on the stock market and chasing endless revenue growth. All other issues I've outlined is a symptom of that fundamental issue. Apple is losing its soul. The author suggests Steve would have done someth…

I will never understand why "make good things and maintain customer loyalty" is not even remotely considered as a viable strategy to "make money"

If you sell people things they want and you treat them well they keep buying from you instead of tolerating you until they stop buying from you.

Capitalism is so fucked

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#234
post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at Windows.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#235
post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

If Apple puts ads in its Maps, there will be an opening for a gorgeously-skinned OpenStreetMaps app. Possibly even with a $1/year WhatsApp-style subscription.

I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.

nose boops Kagi

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#236
post #124

The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5. That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager, everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, t…

I have no doubt that the team behind Liquid Glass had the same noble motivations as the team behind Microsoft's Metro Design Language in 2010. In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!…

I don't think Metro died because it was bad as a matter of taste. Quite the opposite actually, I wasn't a huge fan of its aesthetics but I was surprised by how many people liked it.

No, the real problem was functionality. Not of Metro itself - it was actually very good in that department, arguably still the best mobile UI as far as pure function goes. But the devices ended up being very limited overall because there were so few apps, and what was there was shoddy. Which was in part because Microsoft screwed up with the dev story, and partly because Google didn't play ball (so not only no official YouTube app, but they proactively killed third party ones that could do what the app does on oter platforms).

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#237

I don’t care about whatever Jobs thought, but honestly I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better. Their hardware is still amazing, but I’ve had enough issues with software quality and Cook’s penny pinching philosophy that I’ve bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux. So far, the experience is making me question whether my…

They don't actually have to be good. They just need to be better than viable alternatives.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#238
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I choose Apple for being different from other companies, for valuing customer experiences and for rejecting ads and other "insults" for users Yes. The point of willingly putting yourself in the walled garden was that the experience was definitively better than the other options. When the walled garden ceases to be better and starts adopting all the same dark patterns and user hostile experience as everyone else, wh…

The hardware is still marginally better but the experience is no longer better. In fact with android at least you can sideload and install full powered ad blockers. At some point once the iOS experience degrades beyond a certain threshold, android will be a more attractive option.

From the perspective of a casual user, on Android you get mobile Chrome which doesn't do extensions at all, while on iOS mobile Safari has extensions including ad blockers.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#240

> Some time ago (1999-ish) [...] a number of ways to integrate ads were discussed. > One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. [...] This sounds so weird in 2025. However, I can see that probably in those times there was no "norm", and people were trying different things. Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup might be the norm. And who k…

Kindles have been showing ads on their lock screen for the ad-supported tier for a very long time now.

These days, we have moved to far more insane schemes. E.g. smart TV manufacturers are patenting detection of static frames to show you ads while TV is idle (although I don't think anyone has actually shipped that yet).

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