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Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

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Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#111

Post by DarKraD »

gwd wrote: 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 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.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#112

Post by pzo »

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 standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.

As for services they could go other way:

- be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or charge end user more with subscription.

- make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.

[0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/metrics/revenue-by-seg...

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#113

Post by gdulli »

retskrad wrote: post #53

Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.

I don't understand why people are so tolerant of this first-party advertising.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#114

Post by 827a »

I think you can point to the actual day Apple started this decline they're still on: September 16 2015. That was the day Apple News was released, which I think as a product perfectly encapsulates near-everything wrong with Apple in one convenient package.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#115

Post by cyberax »

retskrad wrote: post #53

Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.

We develop for iOS, so we need to register a bunch of Apple test accounts once in a while. Every time an account is registered, you get around 5 emails of ads. WITHOUT ANY UNSUBSCRIBE links.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#116

Post by jjtheblunt »

metabagel wrote: post #36

I ran a reverse image search on the image of Steve Jobs, and couldn't come up with anything, so it does appear that it might be AI generated, which I don't approve of.

it's super distasteful, i thought, having seen steve jobs in person face to face

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#117

Post by com2kid »

gdulli wrote: post #102
gwd wrote: 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…

> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store > Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms. Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial. My frustration with Ap…

Microsoft used to have one of the best media players around! Windows used to have built in streaming support from device to device. You could load up music on your personal PC and play it on your home theater through your Xbox360! Windows Media Player was huge, only eclipsed by Winamp at the time.

Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)

They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn sucked all the air out of the room.

They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!

Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#118

Post by tgma »

gwd wrote: 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…

Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine. However, you have to question if that’s what most people who use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don’t necessarily have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad supported free music streaming services if they never pay for music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.

Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#119

Post by bell-cot »

chankstein38 wrote: post #46
bell-cot wrote: post #31

> What would Steve Jobs do? > ... I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily similar “opportunity.” ... 1999-ish ... Lee Clow and I were invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac system software. ... Not that I like ads, but - Late 90's Apple, fresh out of a near-death experience, is an extremely different context from tod…

Speaking simply to your comment because I'm not aware enough of their behaviors myself, wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a high Fortune 500 listing potentially be enough to make Steve say "We have enough honestly" obviously that's not the norm, most companies just seem to find any way to extract every ounce of our souls but I thought that was where Apple was supposed to differ, at least under Steve. I honestly don't…

My thinking was that recently-near-death 1999 Apple, with no deep moats nor cash cows, needed to present itself as premium and squeaky-clean.

> ... wouldn't the 12-digit profits and a high Fortune 500 listing potentially be enough to make Steve say "We have enough honestly" ...

It'd be nice to imagine. But given Steve's documented horrible behaviors at a number of points in his life...I sadly doubt it.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#120

Post by cyberax »

hylaride wrote: post #104
FrankWilhoit wrote: post #9

Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.

Use an MP3 player from before the iPod existed and then try an iPod classic. Same with smart phones. There is no way you're going to convince most people that what you say is true in any general sense. Sure, simplification means having to have some opinionated ways of doing things because you're removing options, but there's a very real benefit that can come out of it. If anything, it makes the current state of Apple…

I had an MP3 player before the iPod. It was a CD-based player, and it was pretty good.

I think, iPod was really one of the first users of 1.8" hard drives, so it was better than the competition simply because Apple had access to better hardware.

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