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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

kensegall.com

281–290 of 519 posts

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#281
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…

Once upon a time, Apple used to be different. Now they’re just another megacorp that abuses you with enshittification, like they all do.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner. And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way searc…

> you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.

I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point personally.

That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventually rot and become unplayable.

For example, for optical media the expected lifetime is only a couple of decades depending on the type of media [1]. I believe commercially pressed DVD and blueray are somewhere around 10-20 years.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con... , see table 2.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#284
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 open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me.

The books app itself is infuriating. It's more like a store with a list of purchases attached. Every single time I want to pull up my audiobooks, for instance, I hit the "audiobooks" button.... just to find the store instead. Every time I want to search through my library, I use the "search" box... just to find the store instead. Maddening.

The apple music app I actual really like, probably because it's not actually easy to purchase anything through it. The only major ask is that they stop limiting the number of recently added so I can actually find music I added

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#285
Most Apple veterans and current will agree and tell you they do not like the direction the company has gone/is going.

Most are still there as Apple has one of the most stable employment places, ever. I know a lot of old senior Apple folks who all come back to Apple to retire as the benefits are good, pay is ok, and it’s beyond stable.

To this end, including the way Apple operates, it’s low noise and low friction to just coast and let the leadership team duke it out over revenue streams.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#286
> What made Steve an effective and visionary leader was that his values were so crystal clear.

Steve also underpaid developers - see the court proceedings here.

I am not saying Steve was not creative and effective, mind you. He was that. But he also had a criminal side, and I hate this whitewashing of praising Steve without pointing at the criminal side at the same time. See reports such as this one here:

https://www.thedrum.com/news/steve-jobs-named-top-conspirato...

The media is often not critical of the superrich, even more so when it is owned by them, which is why unaffiliated media must be a LOT more critical in general. The whole article here babbles about how great Steve Jobs is and how bad Tim Cook is. I'd rather like to think that both are or were humans with failure points.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ads are a good way to be spammed with low-quality options that choose to pay apple.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special People made fun of me for continuing to hoard physical media all these years. I predicted this hellscape might come one day. Man I love being right.

I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point personally. That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventual…

I think you're thinking of the CD-R

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#289
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.

AI will soon make this difference (if it even exists) irrelevant.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading. The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.

Would love to know that block list.

Here are the two I have for iBooks. I’m using NextDNS so it will still get blocked when I’m outside the house. I only read my local epubs so I don’t know if blocking these will affect anything you bought on the store.

  *.amp-api.books.apple.com
  *.p2-buy.itunes.apple.com
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