I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.
This happens in Apple News and it's really sad to see. All of the ads are terrible:
* junk hearing aids that appear to produce a strange glow in the users ear
* lead generation ads with clickbait statements (looking right now at "Senior Drivers in Your State With No DUI Should Read This")
* "Motley fool issues first-ever 9x buy alert" (wow first ever!)
* "Little-known Roth conversion strategy allowed by IRS"
I've never intentionally clicked on an ad in Apple News.
This is a service I pay for and these ads are insulting.
How much revenue are they producing relative to my subscription fees? Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.
Which is why the fitness and (for the apple watch ultra) more extreme and expensive sports like mountain climbing and diving are featured. You get the luxury class of people without looking out of touch with the premium class of people.
The people running subscription services within Apple may be measured on metrics (subscriber count/growth) that may not be aligned with the long-term interests of the company as a whole, especially since brand value and the effect of software advertising on hardware sales are hard to quantify.
I think for luxury brands advertising is even more important. Because they need to justify the inflated value of their brand.
Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.
Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.
True. But that’s advertising the product, not advertising in the product. It’s the latter that’s happening here. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands on a Ferrari, starting it up, and … finding an ad on the touch screen.
Apple enlisted Hermes to try and convince watch people that they understand luxury. The leather wrist strap costs as much as a new Apple Watch. As another noted here, premium vs luxury can be quite a step.
They make great hardware. They used to make great devices - but a great device needs the whole user experience to be great. Ad-ridden UI does not make for a great device. Doesn’t matter if it’s first or 3rd party ads.
It’s a great shame. Apple used to be the design standard to aspire to. Now it seems to have embraced enshitification. All because the market needs that share price to keep growing. And lacking leadership good enough to find another way.
If it was random products, it might devalue the brand(or at least the app itself), but its clearly just advertising a more powerful product from apple for doing something similar, if you can't do what you want with the given app.
Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...
They are in business to make money. Brand value and quality are far more nebulous as indicators of value than, say, "We got Brand X to pay us $Y for an ad campaign that will sit in Keynote for the next Z days and will book that revenue on the quarterly results".
The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.
Pretty sure most people commenting here didn't even look at the post to see it's Apple promoting their own related product to their customers, not a third-party ad
Ads are Ads, people hate to see them whatever they are advertising. Especially when they already paid a lot of money to join the ecosystem, upselling to paid customers feels cheap.
Yes they could, they would, and you know it. They'd be serving you malware, they'd look even worse, they'd be for scams, they'd sell all the data they harvest from you to 1000 other companies, etc.
I don't think they can. People expect third-party apps to sell them stuff, but not their OEM.
Apple used to differentiate themselves by not using their OEM apps for ad space. Now they're copying the exact same "curated" promotions style that made Windows packin apps intolerable.
This is all very bad timing. Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks, it is the wrong time for proprietary software providers to start pissing off and exploiting all their users.
I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
> Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks
No you can't. Someone can certainly burn a gorillion tokens to make a 3rd rate clone of Adobe suite that get's posted to HN as pre-alpha that fuels 1000 comments like this though.
I wonder how long will it be until people use ai to start reverse engineering all Apples APIs and protocols so that they can make 3rd party open source apps which can use the fruity ecosystem from outside the wall.
> I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
I think the sibling poster was probably correct. I have the pro version, and somebody mentioned the ads are in the home version which would make sense.
I said I never denied they were there, I just cant see them in my copy so its wrong to call them ubiquitous in Windows.
Maybe unpopular take but ... this isn't just any ad. It's a link to another related product in the ecosystem. Discoverability has always been difficult and there are so many features that remain largely unknown to users because of it.
The title makes it seem like I can purchase an ad and have some kind of ill-fitting content jumping around the screen, trying really hard for my attention. Instead I see an upgrade path from what is free and widely available to a potentially better product. I see this with open source projects too.
It's still an ad though. It's just a context-targeted ad: You get it because you use this product and they want to upsell you. That you might want the product doesn't make it less of an ad. On the contrary. Discoverability is one the purposes of ads. Increasing perceived value is another one but not the only one.
It's the line of thinking that companies like Google tend to push. "All our tracking gives you ads for products you are more likely to want!". Well, yeah. Because those ads are more likely to convert to a sale they are more insidious in my view.
I always like it when I see ads for things that I absolutely do not want because it means they haven't figured me out properly. The few times I watch Amazon prime I tend to get car ads, and I hate cars, I'm never going to buy one. Or dodgy gambling website ones, I don't gamble at all, not even a lottery ticket. It means they don't know what I really want and the ad doesn't really put mental pressure on me to part with my money because it's irrelevant.
The title makes it seem like Keynote is showing ads in the UI, and from the screenshot I see a button that if I press it, will accept my credit card so I can buy a thing.
Just because it's hard to discover things I don't yet own doesn't mean I want them shown to me while I'm making a slideshow.
If you work at OpenAI, congrats on getting people to subscribe in the first place. The marketing is working, OpenAI customers think they're safe from ads!
Apple has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Why do they want to associate it with this tasteless nickel-and-diming? If nothing else, surely this is bad for business over the long term. Gain a few low-value subscriptions, lose a few high-value hardware purchases.
They do this exactly because they are such a valuable brand. Their customers are generally pretty well-off and thus a really highly desired target community: People with plenty of money to spend and who already proved they buy Apple products.
This is the creme de la creme of advertising targets.
Another new annoyance: the Settings app has 2 red notification icons because Apple is trying to sell me extended AppleCare. Apparently no way to turn off these notifications.
It does, and then it comes back a few days later as a friendly reminder to "continue setting up your iPad" as it does on my work one.
In my case it's not AppleCare but Apple Pay. Which is actually pretty useless on an iPad anyway but still it keeps pushing it to me and I've owned the thing for years and clicked the go away button many times.
It's been doing this for years now to try to get me sign into iCloud. I finally gave up and signed into the free version, then disabled every single service.
Apple has always been ultra-narcissistic, pushing designs and features that make their designers feel smart but actively hurt customers and decrease the utility of their products. Now they're even losing that. They ran out of good ideas shortly after Jobs died. Now they've run out of bad ideas and they're speed-running enshittification.
they've been showing ads for years. literally every year i get an ad for the new version of the os. heck sometimes they show popups advertising security updates. apple has no shame.
Yeah same here. I decided to use 5/6 year old trash PCs running Debian. They work absolutely fine. I think I’m actually more productive and certainly less distracted and less broke.
My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.
It's ever so slightly disingenuous to call this "showing ads": It appears to be letting you know about a paid DLC for the app you are running not "this space is for sale".
That said, I don't think it's even a slippery slope from here to "this space for sale".
* junk hearing aids that appear to produce a strange glow in the users ear * lead generation ads with clickbait statements (looking right now at "Senior Drivers in Your State With No DUI Should Read This") * "Motley fool issues first-ever 9x buy alert" (wow first ever!) * "Little-known Roth conversion strategy allowed by IRS"
I've never intentionally clicked on an ad in Apple News.
This is a service I pay for and these ads are insulting.
How much revenue are they producing relative to my subscription fees? Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.
Dell, HP, etc. all have premium products as well as their economy ones. Apple just doesn't do cheap and economy products.
When that gold plated Apple Watch came out, you could feel the discomfort. That's luxury brand territory.
Even the most expensive Apple Watch isn't in that "luxury" category anymore.
Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.
Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.
How so? Just about any major manufacturer has hardware in the same price range.
Or maybe they aren't. They make great devices. I use them. I don't think of them as a luxury though.
> They make great devices
They make great hardware. They used to make great devices - but a great device needs the whole user experience to be great. Ad-ridden UI does not make for a great device. Doesn’t matter if it’s first or 3rd party ads.
It’s a great shame. Apple used to be the design standard to aspire to. Now it seems to have embraced enshitification. All because the market needs that share price to keep growing. And lacking leadership good enough to find another way.
Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...
The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.
Today, I started carrying cash, and switched back to using the NFC chips in my credit cards.
My iPhone 13 mini will probably be my last iOS device. Tap to pay was hard to setup in grapheneos the last time I checked.
I guess I won’t miss it after all.
Apple used to differentiate themselves by not using their OEM apps for ad space. Now they're copying the exact same "curated" promotions style that made Windows packin apps intolerable.
This is exactly the sort of thing that Apple avoided when it had strong management from Jobs. Now...
Pffffff..
I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
No you can't. Someone can certainly burn a gorillion tokens to make a 3rd rate clone of Adobe suite that get's posted to HN as pre-alpha that fuels 1000 comments like this though.
You could.
You very, very, very likely will not.
They know this and act accordingly.
With like a million bucks worth of tokens? Sure.
> Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
I think you're missing a point here.
why would you lie about such an easy to check fact?
I said I never denied they were there, I just cant see them in my copy so its wrong to call them ubiquitous in Windows.
The title makes it seem like I can purchase an ad and have some kind of ill-fitting content jumping around the screen, trying really hard for my attention. Instead I see an upgrade path from what is free and widely available to a potentially better product. I see this with open source projects too.
It's the line of thinking that companies like Google tend to push. "All our tracking gives you ads for products you are more likely to want!". Well, yeah. Because those ads are more likely to convert to a sale they are more insidious in my view.
I always like it when I see ads for things that I absolutely do not want because it means they haven't figured me out properly. The few times I watch Amazon prime I tend to get car ads, and I hate cars, I'm never going to buy one. Or dodgy gambling website ones, I don't gamble at all, not even a lottery ticket. It means they don't know what I really want and the ad doesn't really put mental pressure on me to part with my money because it's irrelevant.
Just because it's hard to discover things I don't yet own doesn't mean I want them shown to me while I'm making a slideshow.
Subjectively, however it feels significantly different to me.
Reasons why that’s the case that I can think of are:
- it shows the offer even when users aren’t searching for the offered product?
- the product that is offered doesn’t signal “in-app purchase”?
- it doesn’t feel like Apple to do this in this way.
Go do that to your free users, not the ones paying your salary.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090557
I wonder whats coming?
This is the creme de la creme of advertising targets.
In my case it's not AppleCare but Apple Pay. Which is actually pretty useless on an iPad anyway but still it keeps pushing it to me and I've owned the thing for years and clicked the go away button many times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQRR-HC_G60
Who tf uses keynote anyway lol
Ads ruin everything.
If we are lucky, Apple can right the ship in time. I wouldn't hold me my breath though.
I miss Steve Jobs.
Serivces have been a huge (and growing) chunk of their revenue for a long time
My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.
If you don’t know what latex is, substitute “html”.
Similarly, the choice of LLM is unimportant.
I also get a lot of life out of MacBooks, they have been pretty reliable for me.
Never forget.
That said, I don't think it's even a slippery slope from here to "this space for sale".