231–240 of 575 posts
Use other platforms. Don't use Apple News. You could use an AI chatbot to find news for you. It has no ads, much easier to read, totally free, and tailored to your instructions.
I never use Apple News but they often pop up among the apps that are using significant energy. I am wondering what does it really do on the background.
Which is why I never us a phone that requires me to have certain apps installed.
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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, A…
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+.
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.
Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense. The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Ap…
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 f…
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.
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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.
That's why you block ALL ads. Starve the beast. If an app has ads, I do not use it, end of story.
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 The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense. The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Ap…
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 f…
Tiktok ads, Youtube Ads, Instagram/Meta ads - there's just a huge influx of scams and obviously fake sites on them. AI generated copy, AI generated landing pages... My honest take on it is that it's the payment companies that are complacent here - they're just allowing payment processing for anyone now up to a certain amount before doing proper diligence. The fact these chinese vendors can spin up a website, get paym…
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.
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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 e…
> 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 ha…
The watch was not only eventually a mega hit, it was an Ive/jobs idea.
Literally everything you are saying is wrong.
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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+.
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…
I don’t know if it is just a symptom of growing up during the days of the net’s Wild West and navigating through sites like gamecopyworld or what, but I just seem to have some inbuilt filter which doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of ads. It’s hard to explain but it is like some subconscious filtering that occurs on a preRecognise hook or something. Weird.