You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.
Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.
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.
They do support syncing up the workouts of people who're each using their own device: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101979
What? Abandonware? They are constantly posting new workouts that are thought out and well produced. The Fitness+ app is very well maintained. It works great. It has cool features. Honestly I don't know what you are talking about, here.
I've worked out together with one to three other people several times. No one cared that their heart rate wasn't shown on the screen. It's really not an important feature and a very niche use case.
It's just nuts peoples hatred of ads clouds their vision of this.
1) The user has never owned an Apple Device in their life. 2) They are trolling super hard.
There are complaints to be had that I definitely agree with, however, I see a TON of fiction for every single legitimate complaint.
No, not an Apple employee, shareholder, etc. (I am broke and dependent on my wife because I am disabled lol)
I am glad that they bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson's books, because I know Netflix wouldn't do them justice and Amazon prime would be far worse than that, but it also means that it will have a tenth of the available audience that a Netflix contract would have brought.
Compare to their much-ballyhooed exercise in lighting money on fire that was their LOTR series.
Same for the other big streaming services. Some of them (Netflix, Prime Video) are more involved in content production, up to and including having production facilities and an in house staff. But a lot of the “exclusive” branded content is made by semi-independent production companies.
And of course the device itself. I wish they would have distinct names.
However, I’ve been subscribed to it since its inception because it is the best way to have games that my kid can play without shady ads or engagement practices.
I know that is not going to last, as my kid is now a pre-teen and likes other types of games (like Hollow Knight) that are not available on Apple Arcade.
But the current state of the gaming industry is terrible, especially on mobile. Indy companies producing games like Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, and Stray are good, and there is the extremely rare case of Larian. But other than that, the market is full of dark-UX patterns to promote app purchases. Mobile apps are a minefield of gacha games that should be forbidden for kids.
Apple one is a steal IMO. Apple TV, Fitness+, 2TB, Arcade, and other smaller perks like News+ make it an easy sell. Compared to something like Netflix? Netflix is $25/mo for their top tier streaming alone. Apple TV consistently has higher quality content. So does Apple Arcade and Apple Fitness...then you get 2TB of storage to back your crap up to.
Ask Google or Samsung what they are doing for the cost of an Apple One subscription.
Not a fanboy or anything. I'm basically critical of all tech companies, however, Apple is doing something that is working well for them.
They raised it a while back to $7/month.
"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.
It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.
You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use").
People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not.
Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free.
People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.
In my mind, “user” stated to take over when we started having web based services that were used by people, but they were the ones paying. For example, Google and Facebook. Both got paid through ads, so they advertisers were the customers. The “users” were just the eyeballs the advertisers wanted to reach. So, you had to make your service compelling enough for someone to use for long enough that they’d see enough ads to make it profitable to provide the service.
It’s more akin to talking about “viewers” or “viewership” when talking about more traditional media.
For Apple, they are generally looking to get paid by the ultimate consumer of the product. So to them, we are the customers.
Maybe I'm just old, but we've called ... users ... 'user' since Unix or before. Perhaps it is just because Unix was integral to my early computing experience that I see it that way.
I'm the (super-)user of my Linux PC. I have total ownership and control over it.
Arguably "customer" makes the business relation to the provider of a service/device clearer.
The term I hate with a burning passion is "consumer".
"customer" represents a two-sided relationship, and I do feel that "user" is kind of one-sided, but gives agency, a user will use a product for their own purposes, presumably to help them achieve some kind of goal. A "consumer" is completely passive, their main goal is to do what the company tells them to do. A customer can walk out of the relationship, a user might complain about problems they have with your product, but the consumer will simply continue consuming whatever you want them to consume.
The worst part though, they seem to be mostly correct in their assessment.
One uses a hammer, one uses a microwave, one uses a computer, one uses a word processor. Nothing negative towards the user, they're being productive with the product.
If anything it's derogatory in the other direction, towards the manufacturer, reducing the fruits of their labour to that of a simple tool.
News+ is the only one of these that has poor quality.
Apple Music is extremely good, and pays artists better than many other platforms like Spotify. Unlike Spotify it isn’t enshittifying the product with AI music, video, and podcast distractions. The software is good quality, native code, not a web wrapper. Plus, there’s a classical music focused version that’s entirely separate.
Fitness+ is a premier product in the space. Have you tried it? The workouts sync with your watch and it has top tier video production quality along with a ton of thought put into accessibility.
Arcade probably does need to have more games added and more attention paid to it, but it’s basically the only place to get mobile games that aren’t stuffed full of gambling mechanics, pay to win, and advertisements.
Apple TV+ is literally the new HBO. They produce some of the most critically acclaimed shows on the planet, and broke the record for number of Emmy nominations by a single studio last year. The software is actually good, which is only really true for TV+ and Netflix. The production values, bitrate, and technology integration (Dolby Atmos/Vision etc) is second to none. MLS coverage by Apple is also top tier, again, with other sports networks regularly broadcasting mediocre quality (bad colors, muddy details, poor on-screen graphics). They’re also getting F1 for US viewers which is almost certainly going to be an improvement over the status quo.
The Play Store Pass? Which not only has games but utilities https://play.google.com/store/pass/getstarted
Yeah, I would say a big ad for a game that is literally THE textbook example of gambling mechanics and dark patterns, followed by 10 other ads for games of the similar genre, is exactly what the previous poster does NOT want from a service like that.
Oh and also from that page there's no telling at all what actual _games_ are included. The only slider on this page that lists anything is for different gambling slop "offers".
That's not even in the same category as Apple Arcade.
It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated. If it wasn't, you'd go buy a market alternative (Android, PC). In my mind, this means that they spent a lot of time and dev resources (i.e. money) on their Frameworks. I think it showed. Time was spent on design. They focused on opening up capabilities "the right way."
Now that's pointless. If the iPhone is just an Android phone with a different coat of paint, then dev resources are going to be shifted to a place where Apple can distinguish themselves in the market, where they have platforms that they can control: Services.
Your argument essentially boils down to: If Apple doesn't get to do whatever they want without compromise, their execs get too discouraged and depressed to innovate. The obvious conclusion is that the only way we can enjoy the unrivaled genius of Apple is to give them a blank check to do whatever they want.
Every act of consumer protection and every form of pro-competitive regulation is twisted and exaggerated, no matter how insignificant it is to their bottom line or product functionality. The world is ending any time they don't get their way and when the world doesn't end, this decision becomes the scapegoat for all of their future faults, missteps, and bad performance. They can never do anything wrong and nothing is ever their fault, it's so so incredibly tiring to listen to this.
The company as a whole has changed across the board.
At least in North America - their biggest market I think? - the iPhone is still utterly locked down. Far more locked down than, say, their Macs were when OS X was at its best. Meanwhile macOS continues to get more locked down and yet still worse. Your theory just doesn’t match reality.
And getting rid of carrier apps was a positive but it was moving from one walled garden to another.
And that happened a very long time ago. It provides zero defense against accusations of apple changing for the worse.
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 format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers.
I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.
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.
It'd be a big one-time lift; and of course there'd be annoying constant breakage to fix as sites update; but News.app could always fall back to rendering the original article URL if the News backend service's currently-deployed parser-transformer for a given site failed on the given article. It's make things no worse and often better than they are today.
In this specific example there is a very big difference between producing a format for use in a first-party app vs trying to replace standards for content used across the web.
I mean... sure it could have? There could have been an independent "AMP Foundation" that forked the standard away from Google and owned the evolution of it from then on. Like how SPDY was forked away from Google ownership into HTTP2.
They kept opening it more and more but by then it was too late.
News organizations have really become quite aggressive about negotiating these things now, I think in large part because Meta (aka Facebook at the time) screwed them badly when it stopped revenue sharing.
This leads to a situation where a product that actually could at least be good and serviceable is a mess. They don't see News+ as being a positive to their businesses to bundle it into the subscription.
edit: I'm open to hearing others on this. I am only pointing out both Apple and the publishers are at fault for varying aspects of why Apple News+ ends up being a mediocre product
Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.
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 execute correctly quickly after.
Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined.
It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely.
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 hardware release was the Apple Watch, which is a confused product, with too many functions on launch, and a poorly thought out two button + scroll wheel + touch screen interface (I still don't really know which button does which). And don't get me started on that ridiculous solid gold version.
You can still see the old Apple in there (look at their hardware!), but it's fragmented and not all pulling in the same direction.
The watch was not only eventually a mega hit, it was an Ive/jobs idea.
Literally everything you are saying is wrong.
I realise that the watch was probably under development for years before Jobs died. It was, however, released in a half baked state – do you remember what the the original use of the lozenge shaped button was, for example? Things being "hits" is not what's under discussion here, Apple has sold a lot of stuff in the Cook era, no doubt about that. Microsoft has had a lot of hits too, doesn't make their products Old-Apple-like!
I don't know how good Ive is without Jobs. His post-Jobs efforts have been pretty mixed. I'd argue Apple's hardware has improved since he left (although, admittedly through playing it safe, especially with the Mac).
Do you think Apple is in decline when it comes to the quality of their products? Because if you don't we're just talking past each-other.
Probably showing my age here, but for me it was the introduction of the iPhone.
Yes, it was a wildly successful product. But it was a product primarily for consuming media (and I will grant taking photos). The iPhone marked Apple's transition from a computer company that focused on computers for creative people to a consumer electronics company.
Certainly a wise choice from a business perspective since there are a whole lot more people consuming things than making them.
But I do miss the old rainbow Apple days when I felt like they really cared about making hardware and software to empower creative people. I still use Macs, and I think they're still the best for creative work, but the company's not the same.
Since then it's been on a nonstop drive to jam as many subscriptions services into the iOS ecosystem as possible.
- Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products
- His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation.
He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it.
As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet.
Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days.
To be honest, I'm not sure if you can entirely blame Cook. Ever since the 2010s, it's felt like capitalism has reached an endstage culture, where it is no longer about an equilibrium between best product for lowest price vs minimum product for highest price, but instead just maximizing shareholder value at the cost of the customer, the workers, the business itself, the environment and what have you.
did you have a specific example in mind? It seems that the price of the hardware generally stays the same from year to year.
for example, from iphone 3g to iphone 6s was $199. and iphone 12 through today's iphone 17 is $799. I think the change in the middle was due dropping carrier subsidies and going to full-screen with face id.
The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences.
People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.
After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.
Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.
There just wasn’t the demand.
They sort of do this with Beats as a parallel business to their own Apple speakers with products that aim at a totally different market. They need to start doing that with computers too. The entire Mac lineup is designed to be, like, a Honda Accord or Camry. But the Mac Pro is crap, they need a business-line that makes a computing equivalent of a pickup truck but they don’t want to commit.
The simple answer would be when SJ passed away. The long answer is there wasn't a turning point, but a long period of cultural shift, due to Tim Cook being CEO.
Tim Cook not immediately taking a CEO stand and left a power vacuum was a mistake. He said himself he thought everything would continue as normal, which obviously did not happen. Firing Scott Forstall was a mistake. Ive taking over software design was a mistake. Not listening to the advice of Katie Cotton and manage a new PR direction was a mistake. Following Phill Schiller advice of firing long time Marketing Firm for Apple was a mistake. Tim Cook not understanding his weakness which is his judgement of character was a big big mistakes, as it leads to Dixon CEO and Burberry CEO taking helms of Apple Retail, ultimately stoping if not reversed the momentum of Apple Retails improvement and expansion by 10 years. Giving Ive the power to play around with Retail Design because Apple Retail Store is somehow a "social place" was a big mistake. Prioritising Operational and Supply Chain Decisions over Design was a mistake after around iPhone 8 Plus. Too focused on sales metric and bottom line was a big mistake. Shifting to Services Revenue, which should have been AppleCare, iCloud or even iPhone Subscription model, instead they got Apple TV+, in my option is a mistake. They were too scared to hurt the relationship with Carriers. Eddy Cue taking over a lot of decisions? Apple going to Davos? Merging of different iOS and macOS team where it used to be teams per product but later became functions per team structure. Trusting China and didn't diversify their production when Trump was first time in Office. ( They said they will but they didn't. Literally every single media lied on behalf of Apple ). I mean the list goes on and on.
I really like someone on HN said about Apple. Ever since Steve Jobs passed away Apple has been left on auto pilot mode for most of its time.
I think I agree. They have a broad selection of apps... that all end up being shallow.
Every once in a while there are decent things hidden though - I like apple translate. I also like adding "copy text from a graphical image" to the OS.
Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.
And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.
Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.
This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.
They didn’t need to do like half the work they did, and a lot of what they did do in order to make the news feeds prettier are seldom adopted because Apple doesn’t want to do the hard partnership work to drive and support it.
Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".