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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

kensegall.com

271–280 of 519 posts

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#271
post #112

Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot on growing revenue from services. Which is kind of sad because they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad: - just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs. - make macbook Pro standar…

This is easily disapproved by just looking at their charts. Especially if you remove the Covid bump. https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/apples-fiscal-2025-in-cha... And even a little bit of analysis will show none of your ideas will grow the bottom line.

Where is the analysis?

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#272

Is that AI Steve Jobs in the header image? Pretty uncanny and takes away from the article.

It's death porn gross AI slop, 100% and immediately obvious to anyone who isn't coming of age in the slop era.

> death porn gross AI slop

Once again in English, please.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#273
post #112

Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot on growing revenue from services. Which is kind of sad because they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad: - just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs. - make macbook Pro standar…

by saturated i think you mean saturated the market. i would argue that almost every person that is their target has in iPhone.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/04/09/teen-iphone-ownership-c...

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#274
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah shame it’s hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and infectious scam ads. Literally unusable without an ad blocker. (Which you should use anyway but it means they’re not a great choice for Joe user on his unprotected windows pc)

A bit deeper into the scene, there are no ads anymore. And the biggest problem for most people in the west, is rather just using torrents without a VPN will get you lawyers letters quite quickly. But Joe average can use youtube downloader without danger.

I’ve torrented for decades, never received such a letter.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#275
post #125
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…

I have to rant about search in the App Store. Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app. Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are pr…

> I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.

Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost less time to find out than writing this comment ;)

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#276
Standards sure have dropped. I saw a new iPad mini in store, on display, and it simply couldn’t run the home screen without stuttering and visible frame rate drops! At least in my mind, this seems like a transgression from Apple’s former standards and that’s before the accessibility and visual challenges new iOS has.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#277
post #59

They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search. For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple? (Now the first result for…

My mother fell for exactly this. Downloaded a ChatGPT clone and paid for it. She was quite upset with herself when I had to tell her.

Until now I blamed Google, but now it seems much more likely that it was Apple’s fault.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#278
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

It is a valid strategy for privately owned companies. Look at Valve—they have their flaws, but they're investing into open technologies and actually improving their product because they know they're sitting on an infinite money printer.

If they went public, no amount of profit would be enough. They would have to squeeze every last cent out of their users for the quarterly reports.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is easily disapproved by just looking at their charts. Especially if you remove the Covid bump. https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/11/apples-fiscal-2025-in-cha... And even a little bit of analysis will show none of your ideas will grow the bottom line.

Where is the analysis?

What’s the average price of a laptop? Hint: it’s much less than $1000. Do you think that people are going to start buying more expensive laptops?

For the iPad, how have the convertible Windows Surfaces been doing?

You really don’t see a problem with creating a “token router”? He also wants to create a distributed CDN where every computer is a node - ignoring the fact that most people have asymmetric internet access with low upload speeds and the entire value proposition of a CDN is that there are colocated servers at ISPs. Bit torrent (basically what he is proposing) is not exactly fast.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#280
post #3

Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here. I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ... Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.

Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience. But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.

>Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.

If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they will).

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