But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!

From this article

> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.

From a recent post by John Gruber:

> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]

Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/06/07Apple-to-Debut-iAds...

> tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option

Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.

Apple has all but conquered the high end of the market, but that ad revenue... it's so tempting... soooo tempting... just one hit...

What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies

Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).

iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.

Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.

What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.

Or just none? I'm not doing anything special and the only ads I ever see are from some games.

Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.

I strongly disagree with this sentiment, Apple shouldn’t be forced by the government to allow other OSes on their products. There is a solution to this, it’s simply to stop buying Apple products if that’s a concern.

Your proposal is that the way to address market consolidation is to buy a different product. You can see the problem with that, right? Products with a network effect need a critical mass of users to be viable, e.g. to be targeted by third party developers and hardware OEMs. The way they achieve that is by starting off with compatibility with existing apps and devices. If the incumbents can lock them out of doing that then new challengers are doomed and your proposed solution is unavailable.

Moreover, it stops being "Apple's product" when they sell it to the customer.

Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new. If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want. Not run to the government to hinder another company because they can’t or won’t compete technologically or brand wise.

There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.

And also Apple customers buy the hardware knowing it runs macOS/iOS. Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open” unlike Google who started that way and is trying to claw things back. You don’t go to a BBQ place and get mad that it serves meat and demand they start serving vegetarian food.

"Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?

> If Android or Linux OEMs want to convince people to move to their ecosystem they should just produce better products that the majority of a population would actually want.

That's what they're trying to do. "OS that people would actually want" is the one that runs their existing apps on their existing hardware. That's the thing the incumbents are blocking them from doing.

"If you want to make a new OS you must first reproduce the entire hardware supply chain and replace the entire installed base of user devices with a new system that has no existing users" is basically saying that you're not allowed to do it.

> There is nothing Apple is doing to lock competitors out of the market. iMessage, Facetime? Convince customers that your option is better.

If I create a messaging app which is exactly as good as iMessage, but Apple preinstalls theirs and not mine on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?

If I make a better messaging app, but Apple bans it from their app store which is the only way to install it on the majority of US phones and messaging apps have a network effect, what happens?

> Apple has never once advertised the OS is changeable or the ecosystem is “open”

Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.

You might if there were only two restaurants and both were really meaty.

Yes, there are more than 2 phone OS options but nearly the whole of the market is those 2.

Linux phones are currently a subpar product and it’s not because of Apple. The device hardware sucks and the actual use of desktop Linux hammered into a mobile OS is an extremely poor experience even without app compatibility.

"Your honor, the defense assumes a fact which is not in evidence."

Why is that a safe assumption in this market in this decade? There are huge barriers to entry, both natural and artificially-created through market-clout and lobbying.

Capitalism is the art of making your customers act like this.

I have had until now 4 Android smartphones, which did not have any ads whatsoever.

Like other posters have said, if you do not buy the phone directly, but subsidized by some carrier, then it might come with crap installed on it.

Of course, currently Google appears to make efforts to make Android worse, so it would not be surprising if ads would appear.

The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).

I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.

It's not better than YouTube after Morphe. Morphe is an app that can patch other apps. It makes the official YouTube app nice by removing ads, skipping over sponsored segments, remove tracking from links, improves the player, etc.

Would be extremely hard to do something similar on iOS.

Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)

Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.

I was horrified about how many ads my wufe has on her iPhone. I mean web ads in Safari. It's unsusable.

That’s just the internet isn’t it?

Not sure we can blame Apple for that, but I’m sure they could cook up a decent blocker if they wanted.

About Photos: why not disable notifications for the Google Photos app?

You are right though. A duopoly is rarely a competitive market, especially for complex products (it can be for commodities)

Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.

Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.

Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.

I use Android

No ads.

I feel left out, thank Dog for that!

In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.

There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.

Source - worked at Apple ~2010.

That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.

On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.

Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.

I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).

Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.

Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.

if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?

I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.

At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].

[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?

¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…

Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.

Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.

Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?

If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?

It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.

Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.

It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.

I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.

Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.

Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.

The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.

Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.

The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.

The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.

Some MBA poisoned it?

"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.

It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?

But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"

Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.

You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.

Yup. If the main differentiator is gone, you move to the next marginal thing that matters, which in this case is working as a map.

And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.

You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.

No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.

Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.

For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.

I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.

I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.

I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.

This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.

It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension

Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.

It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"

Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.

[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...

https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...

Pantone and some sound partnership.

I would say it often feels more like a luxury product than an iPhone or Google-certified Android phone because it's not full of cheesy stuff. It's what iPhone and Pixel would look like if Apple/Google didn't want to push you: subscriptions, AI, movie/music apps, etc.

But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.

I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.

"There's a high chance." https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117299954135808210

In other posts they've said they will be sold with GrapheneOS out of the box.

Sorry, but no.

I also have an iPhone for $REASONS. Both my prior iPhone Air and my new iPhone 18 Pro still frequently stutters. Even scrolling some settings screens (which are very simple), I can often see frames getting dropped. Apple apps like the App Store are one huge frame-dropfest (even if you let it preload all assets). Apple can't get a nearly 1500 Euro phone with the fastest single-core performance and probably the fastest GPU to render normal window chrome smoothly anymore.

My P10P with GrapheneOS, which only has a midrange SoC by modern standards (don't believe what Google tells you) and it is buttery smooth.

iOS got even more terrible with Liquid Glass, so many things are badly readable, even with the slider set to completely opaque in iOS 27.

iOS used to be premium compared to Android. But Apple enshittified iOS over the last few years. Even most Apple pundits agree.

Since people seem to disagree because they simply cannot see it, here are two recordings at 0.5x speed so that even people who are not sensitive to stutters can see it:

https://drive.proton.me/urls/S24N1S17XG#56iNGffWKqZr

https://drive.proton.me/urls/DH527V6GRR#625BpPuAcYPb

Even AOSP is head-and-shoulders better than iOS.

IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.

Cash is much better for privacy. The government, banking system, and countless intermediaries should not know how I spend my money.

So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance.

> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance

I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.

[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371

"Moving from cash to credit cards, PayPal, etc. is an ongoing privacy disaster."

and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place

Pun intended?

No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?

Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.

But still.

Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye or Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.

Even here.

Joh Termus was just picked up randomly out of a box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to checks notes lead all of Apple.

where did that come from? he's been at Apple since 2001.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ternus

I mean. John Ternus and other execs and senior management had nothing to do anything with it. They were all new, picked up randomly out of the box and only obligingly did the bidding of Tim Cook (or Alan Dye, or both).

I bet they don’t see any ads, because their accounts will have the highest tier (or even a special one above that) of everything.

Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.

> internal email from Bill Gates complaining about the usability of some Windows features. It’s old — from 2003

https://www.techdirt.com/2008/06/25/you-thought-you-hated-wi...

This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.

Glad I'm a Linux user and admin.

I guess Apple is shooting their foot by selling their user data for ads because of money.

Betrayal?

https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update/issues/19#issu...

This was after Apple broke the trick to prevent Tahoe update nags.

This is not to excuse Apple, just a useful trick.

Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.

I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.

I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:

- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?

- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?

- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?

- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?

- Why don't I have any system tray icons?

- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?

Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.

(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).

On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.

Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.

Peperridge Farm remembers.

Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how such a thing could remain unchanged for so long.

The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.

(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)

There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.

Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.

Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.

Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.

i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist

your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP

now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)

Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box

But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).

But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.

The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.

2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.

Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.

The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.

This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.

My 2020 XR still gets updates and runs every app I need- uber, school stuff, office stuff.

There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.

With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.

I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.

Edit: and rotation

What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.

On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...

I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking

I got tired of having to haul a separate HDMI display out for Asahi use.

Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.

"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.

[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.

And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.

Basically everyone is getting shafted.

iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.

I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.

I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though

I thought I was the only one.

Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.

You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.

The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.

There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.

I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.

Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.

I accidentally sent my password in a Teams chat at work because an Auth prompt popped up so I naturally typed my password and hit enter like I would on a Mac.

Hilarious. But bad UX.

For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.

But everything else I pretty much agree with you.

The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.

Yellow = yield (minimize)

Green = go (grow)

Makes sense to me.

OTOH among the non-technical people I know they’ve haven’t often complained about this sort of thing, so maybe the real answer is just that this is something where not much explanation is needed in the first place!

They have not had any innovation in desktop UI since 2005.

I have an iMac G5 running Tiger and the desktop environment is almost identical in every way. Except now it doesn’t look pretty like it did in the Aqua days.

It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).

> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.

It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.

> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.

> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great

The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.

> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder

The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.

> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.

> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.

The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.

And the only time I've encountered where it's not Ctrl+C in Linux is in the terminal. That feels like a reasonable exception to be grandfathered in, given it predates desktop environments. I will definitely grant that being able to Cmd+C/V in terminals is pleasant though.

That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.

Edit: It seems that Ctrl+A actually moves back to just after the most recent newline. That is not the same thing as moving back to the start of the line.

What's the difference between "just after the most recent newline" and the start of the line?

It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.

> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.

To be fair, I did in fact get a "Donate to GNOME" interstitial shortly after I first logged in. My agent was able to disable that without too much trouble. I find it obnoxious that GNOME gets to grab my attention for a donation just because they control my UI, while the thousands of other developers who wrote key parts of my OS don't get the same privilege.

That aside, I'm absolutely thrilled with the combination of Apple hardware and Linux software. I can see this being my default "mobile device with a keyboard." It doesn't yet work with my external display, but rumor has it the folks at Asahi having been making strides on that this year. Until then my Framework and Thinkpad both have some more utility as workhorse machines.

I suppose M2 is the most recent platform that has "good enough" Linux support from Asahi, but my M1 fits the bill for most everything I want to do on a mobile device with an attached keyboard. I might pick up an M3 with 24GB to replace it at some point if the Asahi team can get external monitors, GPU acceleration, and sleep working well on that chip.

They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.

[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html

[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck

There will never be a mea culpa from Apple because this has long been their end goal. Tim Cook made it extremely clear that services would be an internal pivot for Apple. It's a lifeline for their quarterly reports, a neverending frontier of captive users that all pay a premium to participate in status games. Apple customers might be the most lucrative advertising audience in the world, all Apple has to do is "protect" them from the bad advertisements and expose curated, trusted promotions that Apple users are sure to love. Then they sell it as part of the trust ecosystem, so that anyone questioning the value of advertisements gets called a malcontent that wants to force Apple users into an wild-west maelstrom of disrespectful, uncurated ads.

This sort of false equivocation "oh-we-can't-fix-it" attitude is how Apple kept their App Store monopoly, and it's how they continue to deny ecosystem integration to respectful alternative software. It's an insult to capable users and the core reason why I had to leave the ecosystem. There is no reason to pay a price premium versus Microsoft if my OEM begs me to Try the new Safari! or Get Three Months of <garbage you don't want> for FREE! My blood pressure goes up just remembering the stupid shit that Microsoft and Apple imposed onto "my" computer.

If you continue down this road of legitimizing user-hostile design, you will sacrifice everything you love about Apple. It's a Procrustean bed upon which good apps are hammered into service revenue.

Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.

If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…

I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.

But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that

According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.

With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.

Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.

I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.

It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.

It's mildly annoying to have to do the swipe-down-and-search to get to settings but it's not an app I use all that often.

This is a solved problem and you are not utilizing the solutions.

Apple you paid a lot of money to already.

there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible

but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.

The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.

https://www.fulu.org/contact-us

I had a similar experience with promotional notifications from Hyundai: I suspect I'm not the only person who called their support saying, "I don't want ads from a $70,000 car."

I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.

But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.

AFAIK you can click them away.

It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.

I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?

I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.

> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."

> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.

There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."

Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.

That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.

Obviously offering add-ons to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.

Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.

If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.

I hate ads, but mentioning other first party services feels very different than selling parts of the system UI like a billboard.

These service upsells should be dismissible but they seem fairly inoffensive. The App Store ads, on the other hand, are just atrocious

Okay, probably not the Trump phone but all the other's I've listed make some pretty great (and expensive) options.

1. Can't turn off Siri easily, turns itself back on.

2. Apple search not things it should obviously being able to find, just like Windows search.

3. Ads in the operating system like Windows 10+

The latest think I've noticed is that iTunes now advertises at one price but actually bills me at a higher price (79p in iTunes, £1 on my credit card).

If Apple behaves like every other manufacturer it will stop being worth the premium.

- Ads for Apple Care

- Ads for Apple Fitness+

- Ads for iCloud stuff.

That's the thing, though. Those modal offer popups have been in macOS and iOS for a really long time, and does cheapen the experience like Microsoft and Google products do.

But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.

(But, yeah, I'm reminded that I need to set up a Pi-Hole on the Starlink in the camper. I'm paying by the byte for those TechRadar ads.)

Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.

Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.

If that goes away I will have no reason to buy apple.

And you can dismiss them.

I’m not defending ads or Apple here, far from it as I hate what they’re doing. I’m just saying that while we’re used to privacy invading ads, not all ads have to be so.

F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.

I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!

All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"

Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.

I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.

Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.

In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research

The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".

Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).

I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)

I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.

I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.

Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.

They somehow manage to threaten you that they'll delete your local photos...

True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.

When you have willingly agreed to live your cyber life exclusively in the inside a golden jail, don't complain when the COs decide to collectively abuse you.

Are you fucking kidding me

And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.

Options is all we need, and tools to customize them. And just like Blackberry or Nokia, they will learn the hard way