I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
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?
When iAd launched, it was a $1 million minimum spend just to get onto the platform, they wanted large corporate “lifestyle” brands, Apple exerted creative control over how ads were designed so they could enforce a bunch of user experience guardrails & marketers had no means of independently verifying campaign performance themselves. Their only source was whatever Apple told them. It did not do well. A few years later they tried to salvage it by dropping the minimum spend to $50, removing themselves from the process & making it closer to Google’s AdMob—or approximately as much as Apple was able to early last decade—but it was too little too late. They dropped it by 2016.
When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.
Well, and dozens of other innovations every other company copied, conveniently ignored.
From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI, to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on, to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta, to the first modern touch smartphone, 1 full year before Android came out (and which made Android change its beta design to copy the way iOS worked), to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right, to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip. Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
Modern "services+ads" Apple sucks to the point that I'm moving away, but to say they didn't innovate is laughable.
I don't want to really downplay Apple but there's much better innovation examples that what you listed. One of Apple's great advantages is that it owns the hardware, unlike Linux or Windows. Those have to work in highly heterogeneous environments. I mean Linux runs on everything from a literal potato to a super computer and everything in between.
To highlight Apple's innovation maybe mention things like the iPhone or iPod. They weren't the first devices of their kind but Apple's magic was always the mixture of the two Steves. Technical but stylish. But modern Apple isn't the same. The magic is gone
A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with...
> From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI
Ignored because nobody cares or wanted it.
> to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on
Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
> to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta
That's a remarkable engineering achievement but that's an implementation detail. Backwards compatibility on the desktop was and still is tablesakes.
> to the first modern touch smartphone
Nobody forgot, there's always one of you to remind the class that Apple was first (by your own definition of modern touch smartphone)
> to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right
They were clearly the first to demonstrate that people did indeed want fully wireless despite HN's objections at the time.
> to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip
That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
> Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
I don't know anyone who claims otherwise, and for the longest time they didn't make their own touchpads. So much for being conveniently forgotten.
>A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with... / Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
That explains why someone younger might not see the innovation. But that's on them, the innovation doesn't get erased as an innovation because people take it for granted. If the question is "did Apple innovate", then it includes all those cases, whether some moody Gen A cares for them or not.
Besides, that's not an argument. Apple still has many recent innovations. And we're talking as techies, devs, and products people here, and of various ages. Not just as "people who only ever known Spotify" and never bothered to learn the history of their field. Those wont know what Rosetta or a 5G chip is either anyway.
>That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
A, yes, all those classic Google, Facebook, and MS designed CPUs, that put a fire under Intel/AMD and set the benchmark for future laptop CPUs. You're being disingenuous.
What a bad-faith comment. You just wanted to launch into an anti-Apple lecture and it doesn’t sound like you have the slightest clue about this specific topic. Have you watched the iAds presentation? They’re not like any other advertisements I’ve seen before. CERTAINLY not at the time. You can see exactly why advertisers didn’t bite.
It's probably the single one time where I would actually want ads.
For example roaming the city at 4am on a Saturday and trying to find some place with hot food. Google failed miserably at this. Eventually I found something but just because I knew it was often open at night. It was also marked open on Google Maps but never came up in searches there. Probably other places paid Google more for a listing despite being closed at that time.
Not sure how Apple does with this as I don't have any Apple anymore except a work iPad. It's too limited for me in terms of what I can install. But there's certainly some room for improvement in mapping.
Hah, that Google experience clicking though closed closed closed... Okay fine, i will accept my stupidity for even considering this approach. Wont happen again.
Oh I didn't find it, I have to say I don't use google maps very much. I normally use OSMAnd only. But most businesses don't bother updating their opening hours on openstreetmap.
What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> Almost every company, tech or otherwise, even expanding into things like sports have faced this. It’s nothing new.
"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.
> "Bad thing has occurred previously, therefore nothing should be done about it"?
The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
> 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.
I mean I just disagree here, I don’t know what else to say. People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything. They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
Other companies can step up and provide actual competitive hardware. There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like. They’ve just settled for mediocrity in some aspects (i.e. Google holding onto their Tensor chips, or not improving the UX/UI of Android, or even improving its brand perception).
> If I create a messaging app…
Not the same thing at all as far as other OSes go, this is more applicable to something like allowing Chromium on iOS. The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS. Google attempted it (or still does?) and their branding and advertising are just so incredibly bad they do nothing to sway the average population.
I think like a lot of the HN users here, the Android and Linux OEMs and even companies like Framework are disconnected from the average consumer and can’t comprehend why people choose Apple and don’t care about all the technical stuff like an unlockable bootloader, installing apks, etc.
> Ma Bell never once advertised that you can use your own phone on their phone network.
Again, not the same thing as Apple holds nothing near a monopoly in the US or worldwide.
> The solution isn’t degrading another company’s product or forcing them to do x when there’s already existing competition.
How does it in any way "degrade" their product to allow the customer to do something with it that the customer is not required to do?
> People were fully aware of what Apple was when they bought the products, Apple didn’t trick anyone, or anything.
We can disagree about this one too. Consider what happens if a company simultaneously has no ads and prohibits ad blockers. People aren't really going to object to the prohibition on ad blockers in that case, right?
Then they introduce ads and suddenly the prohibition on ad blockers becomes relevant, but your reply is that ad blockers have always been banned. Okay, but now there are ads.
If your claim is that you can't object if something doesn't change, does that imply you do get to object every something does change?
> They also are not the sole phone OEM and they don’t have a monopoly.
They have more than 50% market share in the US. The trope that anyone who has less than 100.0% market share can't violate antitrust laws is invalid.
Moreover, "two companies together have >99% of the market" is an oligopoly the likes of which is exactly what is meant to be broken up, regardless of what the split between them is. A duopoly is not a competitive market.
> There’s nothing stopping Samsung or (especially) Google from putting more effort into their lineups to match the performance, fit and finish that Apple users like.
We're talking about competition for operating systems. The GrapheneOS Foundation isn't Samsung -- and Samsung locks their bootloaders, so they can't even use Samsung.
> The appropriate comparison would be if another OEMs OS had a messaging feature baked into their OS
Only in the sense that then they would both be engaged in anti-competitive behavior.
Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share. People act like Apple was just miraculously granted market share over Blackberry and that they didn’t create a competitive product to earn that spot.
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.
> Then if there’s a good enough product for it, it’ll gain market share.
"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.
This isn’t permanent. We see the rise and fall of plenty of brands overtime (Nike, Mitsubishi, etc).
If your branding and product is good enough you can overcome this. I mean just look at social media networks too that constantly come in and out of the picture.
Can you find a US or EU-based social media platform launched in the last 15 years that isn't now a subsidiary of one of the incumbents?
The closest you can come is things like Signal or Discord that are more like messaging apps than social media, and even then both of those are more than 10 years old and both of them put together have less than 10% of Facebook's user base.
Network effects are wicked when incumbents are allowed to purposely impede interoperability.
I thought about this in a different context many years back. A friend lent me a GP2X, a Linux based handheld game console. I already had a Nintendo DS, with one of those homebrew cartridges (which I used for the officially advertised purposes, rather than the wink-wink-nudge-nudge purposes). That got me to thinking whether locked down platforms were okay, that they may actually provide opportunities for developers of open systems.
The problem is that history has proven time and time again that it doesn't. While the homebrew scene for the DS was vibrant, even with the barriers, it was lacklustre on the GP2X, even without the barriers. There were likely a lot of reasons for that, but they all pretty much add up to the idea that not buying locked down products will not help.
I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.
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.
> The average person has no idea what lineageOS is
The beauty of it is that the average person can buy a LineageOS-enabled system without having to know it's not "normal Android". Look at /e/OS for instance, and hopefully soon GrapheneOS will come preinstalled on some Motorolas.
Actually they don't work because those apps suck. Typically the banks are responsible for preventing their own apps from working there. Because they don't care or because they follow some bullshit security-theatre policies, or because they just don't understand security, I don't know.
It's not Google that adds the code that makes your banking app fail: it's the goddamn bank itself.
But I agree with your point that the reason it sucks is not the AOSP-based system, and it's sad to blame the system when it's the app (or many times just Google) that is to blame.
And AT&T shouldn't allow you to connect other phones, or modems at all. You should only be able to get a phone by renting it monthly from AT&T - everything else should be illegal.
lol. what an android user comment. “Simply install LineageOS! All you have to do is extract this tarball…”
A solution that’s just for computer nerds is close to no solution at all. It’s certainly not one I care to talk about. I may do it myself, but I don’t for a second consider it in any legitimate discussion about how any non-negligible portion of the market behaves.
When I first switched to Android, I was shocked to see Google's Photos app send me an ad for buying printed printed framed photos. After turning that off, I haven't noticed many ads.
Google Photos is always trying to upsell storage beyond 15GB: "(you're going to lose your pictures), turn on backup?". Even pressing the "Search" button got me that prompt once, with some blah blah that AI-assisted search only works when the photos are on the cloud...
> What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?
We're on HN. If you're on Android and seeing ads then you're doing something wrong.
I don't disagree with your main point, but the H is important context here
BTW, in iPhone I tend to get lots of ads because Safari doesn't have ad block, I can't repackage APKs, can't edit DNS, not to mention all the spam calls/texts (especially from icloud emails...). Thank God the ublock folks got an iPhone app. I mean it isn't a fair comparison, a rooted Android vs stock iPhone, but it's trivial to root a pixel and on an iPhone I can't even access my photos from a terminal emulator... so there's no fair comparison that can be made
I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.
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 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.
Which Android though? AOSP doesn't have ads. But Samsung phones are full of ads for their own and other's services (McAfee VPN, McAfee security scan, OneDrive, etc.). I heard that Chinese phones are similar. Even Pixel pushes Google One in places.
The primary exceptions are GrapheneOS and Lineage, but it's not like people can buy a phone with them in the store (yet).
I have used several models of Sony Compact phones, until Sony discontinued that line of products, then ASUS phones.
No ads on any of those, and moreover I never had and still do not have any Google account.
The only problem that I had for not having a Google account was that one of the banks with which I was working terminated their on-line banking and replaced it with a smartphone app. That would not have been a problem, except that they refused to provide the app directly for download, but only from the Google store, which cannot be used without a Google account.
> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage
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.
My stock Pixel phone has zero ads. It prompts you to enable things like Wallet and all the AI stuff, but I just turned that off, and it's not bothering me anymore. There are no persitent ads.
I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.
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.
Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).
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.
It's worse than that. Google Photos sends push notifications telling you to buy photo books and prints unless you opt out. Play Books also sends push notifications telling you to buy particular books; it's also opt out. I'm semi-certain other built-in apps like YouTube and the Play Store do the same.
However, once you turn all that junk off, the Pixel experience is pretty good.
Why would you even enable notifications on these apps?
I'm on GrapheneOS, so they are not enabled by default, but I think on Google certified Android you can also switch them off. Also, besides that, if apps implement notifications nicely, they are nicer on Android, because you can turn on/off notifications per category/channel. Of course, some apps just put everything together.
> 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?
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.
I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.
Does anyone use the App Store other than to search for an already known app name? I probably have not in over a decade, and I can't see a reason I ever would.
Best part of searching the App Store for something you know is that even though the hamming distance between the search term and the thing you want is 0, the thing you want will not be at the top of results anyway.
This causes me so many issues. Rolling out multi-factor authentication and having some no-name random app show up as the first result for "microsoft authenticator" is downright malicious behavior on the part of the app store.
I used to. In the "golden days" of "there's an app for that", I would peruse the App Store looking for new games. I spend hundreds of dollars on games doing that. Now, the only games you see really are shovelware or subscription garbage.
“iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users—a highly desirable demographic for advertisers—and provide developers a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low cost applications.”
Don’t mix apples with oranges Steve was The Apple those guys are CE—replaceable-O-ranges. If board and shareholders want ads there is no one to tell them get lost anymore.
Search on the app store sucks too. I haven't been able to find either a way to search for only apps that charge for downloads (I don't want to watch an ad for features, or nickel and dimed on IAP), or some kind of "minimum price" slider I can use.
That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.
"Stop guessing. AppRaven(.app) shows you what people really search for on the App Store, what they complain about in the apps that already exist, and hands you a plan you can start coding today."
> I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.
Sorry. For some reason got him mixed up with Steve Lemay lol.
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.
Read the original comment: "I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.".
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).
Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
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.
> 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'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].
Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.
The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.
Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?
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…
The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.
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.
> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt
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.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
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.
It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.
Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.
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).
Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…
it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?
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?
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.
> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.
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 think some of it just that different people have different priorities. Some of what protected Apple was vanity. I think Steven Jobs cared about how people saw him and his products. He wanted to be the guy who made a premium product that he thought was cool and was proud of. The longer time went on, the less Apple execs cared about what he would have wanted and started caring more about what they wanted.
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.
I think the Apple Effect was largely a result of personal narcissism.
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.
Steven Jobs definitely cared about the polish as a reflection of himself. He wanted people to associate the name Steven Jobs with apple. When people thought of apple they thought of Steven Jobs. He didn't want to put the name of his company on anything unpolished or tasteless because people would associate that with Steven Jobs, since everyone knew Steven Jobs had the final say.
I think it's not just Apple. Everyone and every company seem to become greedier and greedier. Economically, the world is not in a great place, apart from a minority which just gets richer and richer.
While I don't know, my suspicion is that the market is saturated, but the company is still hungry for "numbers go up".
"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?
I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.
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"
apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.
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.
Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?
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 think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
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.
> I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
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.
But you can just use the browser with an adblocker for Youtube on the phone, which also allows you to play audio in the background for free e.g. for playing music, what's the point in using the app at all?
> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (
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?"
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
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.
GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
From what I've seen of GrapheneOS, it's not a luxury product, it's a product for tinkerers, who don't mind finicky granular configs. If I'm paying a premium, I expect sensible, privacy respecting, defaults that I can use out of the box. Not constant fumbles until everything is "setup".
I think you have a wrong idea about GrapheneOS. You install the sandboxed Play Store/Services through their app store and then it's pretty much the same as any other Android phone. Except that it doesn't get in your face with preinstalled crap (Google, Apple, or Samsung). On the GrapheneOS forums there are a lot of non-technical people that install GrapheneOS and don't have many issues. The primary annoyance is Google's abuse of their monopoly with Play Integrity.
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.
I don't think there's any defaults you need to change out of the box besides installing the apps you want.
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.
As someone who has daily driven both side by side as much as I love GOS, AOSP / Android absolutely does not feel premium compared to iOS. Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS. And the FOSS apps on Android are extremely subpar in terms of feel compared to iOS (off the top of my head look at how bad the Fossify Contacts app is compared to Google Contacts) but that’s the trade-off.
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.
Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS.
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:
When I see "polish" they're usually referring to the opposite of things like this. They seem to like sluggish UI as long as it's "smooth" (not "fast") and has flashy animations.
Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.
No android auto? What are you basing this on? I ask because I am responding from grapheneos while connected to android auto, and I am concerned I am in the wrong universe again.
It does. You do have to install it (GrapheneOS provides a Play Store Sandbox to install google apps to) intentionally, it is not installed by default. Perhaps that tripped up the author of the misinformation you came across?
In any case, it is a fantastic OS with many of the annoyances of Android removed. (Scoped file permissions are fantastic, for example) If you are on the fence, I'd suggest giving it a shot. Replacing a phone OS might seem scary, but it is really pretty similar to use.
There is Android Auto. There's contactless payments in Europe through Curve, Paypal, and some specific banks. Some companies are working on bringing them to the US.
Funny enough, the only part of Apple Pay I use with any frequency is the browser/app integration part, basically as a much more convenient alternative to PayPal sometimes.
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.
I agree about cash, but we are talking about a luxury experience. In fact, GrapheneOS has talked about it [1].
> 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.
In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.
At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.
> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
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
Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!
Soon enough they'll be asking you to pay for Storage Space Pro (lets you open the trunk) and Intelligent Manual Media Control (lets you slightly lower the volume of ads that automatically blast out of all the speakers when the car is on)
I haven’t worked for Apple but you’re definitely correct. Just compare what Jobs said about using a stylus with how happy the company was to announce that you could use Apple Pencil with the iPhone duo. It is self-evident. It’s far from the company Jobs once ran.
You’re misunderstanding that quote. “If you saw a stylus they blew it!” referred to requiring a stylus to interact with the touch display. Having one optional, mainly for drawing, isn’t quite the same thing.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
Yes, and it makes sense to add the stylus/pencil after app developers had to learn how to deal with finger taps only. Apple did the same thing with the original Mac. There were no arrow keys on the first model, so that developers were forced to accommodate the mouse.
Steve Jobs also repeatedly dissed the idea of an iPod that played video as late as one year before they started selling the iPod Video. I wouldn't take any of his stated opinions as gospel.
I like being able to use Procreate or other image editing software on my iPad, and the only reason I’d consider a foldable in the first place is because I’d like to use it like I use my iPad. What’s so bad about having the option to use a stylus? Who cares what a dead tech oligarch once thought of styluses? Especially when the state of the technology wasn’t where it’s at now. If you could ask Jobs now, maybe he would have changed his mind.
That's not a given. Visionary people sometimes go mildly insane over time. Source: worked at VKontakte and Telegram and watched it slowly happen to Durov.
Questionable features like being able to delete anything in the conversation on both sides. Tacky UI choices like liquid glass on Android or the excessive use of Lottie animations every-damn-where. All while being completely deaf to feedback, both from within the team (any criticism makes you "toxic") and from the public. The way he treats his employees isn't exactly good either.
But you can no longer trust Telegram that things you had in your chat will still be there tomorrow. This feature feels like someone has hacked into your device and deleted files they didn't like.
"Your" chat consists of other people's messages too and they own those. You can also delete your messages on Discord or Slack – it's quite normal as a feature.
Firstly, I'm talking about PMs, not group chats. Group chats have different requirements because they have to be moderated.
Of course, I have nothing against being able to delete your own messages for both. A time limit within which you can do that is nice but I can live without one. But Telegram lets you delete every message in any PM conversation, including incoming ones, for both people. Or even the entire conversation, and make it disappear from the other person's list without a trace.
Jobs has long been vocal about protecting the user experience. Not 100% sure if it's true, but I heard Jobs was originally opposed to custom apps running on the iPhone (the App Store), because he 'didn't want to turn iPhone in Windows'.
Jobs was right. Apps are so shitty now I don't even bother. Everything has a subscription now and there's so much noise its hard to actually find signal on the appstore.
It wouldn't have died - most apps are still just a thin UI over a corresponding online service, and most of the data and services proprietary APIs provide ended up achievable in a browser too. It is really just the internet that makes apps and smartphones useful.
All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
Early on it was different with a lot more stuff actually running locally vs cloud service era. App store predated that for a little bit actually. There weren't microtransactions initially either. What you'd call a AAA game for that platform back then would actually be $9.99 one time payment.
Indeed. That’s what resulted in Apple beingn different than competition. Too bad Apple engineers were reprimanded and publicly humiliated, sometimes with no fault. But Jobs had a vision that’s been long gone from Apple and it really shows. Sometimes I wonder if Jobs himself would be corrupted by Apple’s success but I’ll never know the answer to that…
Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).
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.
Exactly, not "even", these huge companies have to squeeze money out of everything. To keep their growth rates up, they have to make bigger and bigger swings.
Exits to where? I personally I dialed down my phone use to a minimum. I still use Iphone just because I see no better alternative for my sporadic use. I use few apps minimally and install almost nothing, i can't remember when I last visited the app store.
Well you took the exit to "using my phone less", which is good for you, bad for Apple (less service revenue, probably less frequent hardware sales from you)
I bet you there is a CEO and friends version that is absolutely add-free.
The problem is the shareholders getting value from add adds now, while reducing the value of apple shares in the long run, by allowing a new premium producer to emerge.
It's not a root account issue, it's that they have already bought all the services there are to buy. One would assume that once you buy a service, they would stop prompting you to buy it.
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+.
No, hardening has nothing to do with it. They have a feature flag system deeply embedded in their software. And such systems can totally distribute different flags to different people. And that's how you could easily create VIP accounts with different behaviors than the rest of the world, like all ad festures turned off.
I guess it was simply too close to reality. That's why I didn't register that as humor. Text also doesn't carry tone of voice well, which makes confusion more likely
It is because of things like that that i'm using Android. I feel like one of those boomers having no clue about tech whenever i am handed an iphone: everything feels like a trick, a set of secret gestures and recipes that everybody has mastered but me.
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.
Can't say I agree - I honestly tried using an iPhone for a few weeks, and I still couldn't reliably get where I wanted, because there's a good chance some input on the way would suddenly result in a totally different effect.
It feels like 80% of the UI has non-obvious overloads. I must have either skipped the tutorial or been too blind to find it, because otherwise these things are anything but intuitive. I've never struggled as much with any Android device, even with exotic manufacturer UIs.
It's true of android too, you're just used to it. Even Graphene eliminated the back button, and makes you swipe left from the right side instead, and the app switcher and home buttons, and makes you swipe up-right from the bottom.
No, I genuinely have not encountered the same reliability issues on any Android devices, even on my very first one.
I'm not a big fan of such gestures (mostly due to discoverability), but the few times I've used an Android without the navbar the gestures still felt reliable, even if I had trouble remembering them.
I got a Pixel 10, installed GrapheneOS. Then Google Play (which is sandboxed). I have 99,9% of all apps and a barebones launcher and some barebones fossify apps. Its pretty good, ugly if you let it but not bad
Wow, I read it as "John Temu", which seems to be what Apple is being turned into.
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.
I knew we were cooked when Costco started upselling its cookies at the self-checkout food court.
I think it really speaks to the situation we've gotten ourselves into. Capitalism requires us to constantly grow but I think the problem is we're myopic and believe we need to grow faster and faster. With the high concentration of power these companies have the easiest lever to pull is by making a service worse and having users pay for a better experience. That's a very different strategy than offering new products and/or features.
I call this myopic because it really only works when there's little to no competition but using it too much causes more backlash and causes people to get pissed enough to become the competition (and not sell out). I think Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play here. People aren't aligned with the goals of the organization. To be honest, it's hard to think of any company where it's clear the leaders, let alone employees, are dedicated to the goals of the company[0].
It's really sad too, since all these big companies seem to just be a shell of what they used to be. They used to be inspiring and it was exciting to see all the change and innovation. But it just seems to be more and more disappointment lately. Small changes so people can push their small org's status. No one taking any risks to really push things forward. These companies cornered the markets, have trillion dollar evaluations, yet act like they're poor. That boy ain't right...
[0] don't give me that nonsense of "the goal is to make money". The comment is about myopia. If this is your first reaction, you're being myopic and missing my point. You're welcome to disagree, but don't strawman
> Accountable mixed-use crawlers remain allowed for search. Every other training crawler is blocked, including the training-only crawlers run by Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI — blocking those does not affect search.
> We also categorize the relevant crawlers from Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI as Accountable. These organizations separate their Search and Training crawlers, so Cloudflare can block the Training crawler without affecting search.
I find it difficult to trust that either Meta or OpenAI would use their separate search and training crawlers only for the respective purposes. Their pinky promises have no value, IMO. Both companies are premised on deceptive behaviors.
What exactly is “builds minutes”? I looked at the FAQ and Docs but couldn’t find what it means. Are there static sites where the build process consumes, in total, 5000 minutes (in the paid plans)? How often are these sites being updated?
A few days ago I saw some people criticizing Dwarkesh’s explanation of the HuggingFace hack by OpenAI’s AI agents. Their point was that by anthropomorphizing the AI agents, accountability of and blame on OpenAI’s poor practices are being ignored.
Now I see this blog post and wonder if Anthropic is being more true to its name and moving to “AI sentience” with the below.
> The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this:
> If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation.
“Mistreated”? Can GenAI be mistreated? It’s just a bunch of tokens emitted by many computers over a network.
> Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation:
> Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect.
“Self-respect”? Can GenAI truly have a concept of self-respect for itself? It surely can pretend to, like it can pretend to be any living being if instructed to and allowed to.
Based on how humans grappled with these exact same questions (and still do) concerning other animals much closer to humans on the sentient gradient, it’s fair to assume we will have similar misunderstandings in regards to artificial intelligence (or artificial life, if you will) because of human hubris and ego blinding us to deeper truths.
It’s important to question our basic assumptions in the face of entirely new circumstances and new areas of exploration, such as the potential for emergent artificial consciousness.
You might have been called unhinged for caring about animal rights during the era of Descartes when public displays of animal vivisections were considered perfectly fine because animals have no “soul”, but today we would find such displays brutal and horrifying.
We don’t know what we don’t know, so it is important that someone is asking the hard or uncomfortable questions at the edge of our understanding to grope past our own biases even if it seems to be pointless to you right now.
We might just discover something wonderful, that our assumptions were wrong, paving the way to greater enlightenment.
Unless you actually believe there is something magical about the human spirit - someday we are going to make sentient machines.
What exactly is wrong with preparing for that ahead of time? Just in case we pass that threshold before we realize it? Why does it make you uncomfortable?
There is a distinction between two important concepts here. There is access consciousness and there is phenomenal consciousness. The actual paper published alongside the j-space blog post discusses the idea of access consciousness if you are interested.
Phenomenal consciousness is what the hard problem of consciousness is about. I personally believe there is a good reason to think the reducibility of this concept to some substrate independent description is equivalent to having a proper definition, and also believe it is not reducible to such a description. Hence the only definition one can give is akin to pointing at the moon and hoping you don’t look at the hand. I.e., phenomenal consciousness is first person experience, the existence of qualia, and that the “lights are on”.
We are biased as educated people to believe all concepts are reducible to substrate independent description but there is no reason to believe this a priori.
The substrate non-independence of consciousness, if correct, could mean we won’t just build one no matter how intelligent and human-like they become.
I agree with you that there is nothing “magical” about our intelligence. However we have as a species effectively believed in magic since Newton decided gravity is a black box that cannot be reduced to the mechanical philosophy, and went on with describing its properties formally. We don’t call it magic, but physics. We call quantum mechanics unintuitive because it disagrees with the Boolean logic that is appear at the every day level. For some reason we keep making this mistake over and over.
(There is one weakness to my view that I aware of. I think there must have at least at some point and maybe still been a role in which the process that results in phenomenal conscious plays in a correlated intelligence, because it seems unlikely to persist through evolution if not. I.e. certain physical processes encode information better than others, and we happen to live in a universe where such process is aligned with consciousness. Substrate independence doesn’t have to contend with this, but it does have worse problems in my view.)
Can we agree your reply is rude given than I have made a fair effort to explain my view to you already? This is not a simple topic and one should not expect the whole thing to come down to a tweet; neither is an accurate understanding of evolution I’ll add.
Which part can I express better? Do you know what I am referring to by phenomenal consciousness?
I apologize if I've caused offense - I knew it would be contentious but I thought it was more important that you understood my perspective from the outset.
I have looked up "phenomenal consciousness" and I understand it to be roughly the qualia of being conscious. I do not understand then what you meant by "reduce to a substrate independent description".
I hope you can understand why I was so dismissive - your large block of text became unintelligible to me only 5% of the way in.
I’m not more offended than by the army of people here informing me that my IQ is low, so no worries. I don’t have the skill to express these ideas more succinctly, and I apologize for this. I’ve tangled a lot, so I can try to express some parts in more organized manner if you’ll bear with me.
(1) An important topic in consciousness studies is Chalmers’ hard problem; the original essay is very readable and I recommend it. He sets it aside from the “easy” problems of explaining how various human functions correspond to neural mechanisms, since he supposes these are clearly achievable by science with time. Many find this name contentious or the framing misguided. The hard problem is to explain how and why phenomenal consciousness exists, i.e., that there is an experience that goes along with some of those neural mechanisms. This is perplexing because if the functional aspects can all be explained mechanically, there is no a priori reason there must be an experience.
(2) Substrate independence is the quality of the essential features of a process to depend only on their information content, not on the underlying medium expressing the information. For instance, the working of an operating system is substrate independent in the sense that it can run on different hardware. It is a commonly held belief that consciousness is like this, and I suspected this was your view. My own belief is that fundamental physical processes are substrate dependent. Each assumption has different explanatory power and issues.
I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue.
> I fear this is not succinct but my urge is to continue.
Regardless, I understood all of it, and I thank you for sticking it out with me.
Re (1) - yes, I am familiar. To cut to the chase - I agree that P-Zombies can never be strictly ruled out, but I find this issue to be akin to solipsism.
Re (2) - yes, that does describe me: neurons are no more conscious-making than transistors. But again, I agree this can never be proven strictly.
The most naive versions of substrate independence have a hard time contending with Putnam’s thought experiment showing rocks are conscious (Chalmers has a webpage discussing this also); the idea is that a sequence of machine states can be made to correspond 1-1 to a sequence of rock states. There are stronger versions which start making assumptions about causal and organizational structure, which is probably your view. This suggests at least that consciousness depends not only on information expression, but the manner in which the information expression happens. This doesn’t preclude your position, but it starts to sound like the substrate might matter because certain causal and organizational architectures may be only expressible in our reality in certain ways.
This rocks thing sounds like an argument I heard Searle make one time - that the vibrating molecules in a wall can be thought of as sentient because you can map them to intelligent output (where, of course, the intelligence is actually hidden in the mapping.)
I don't know how to resolve these things - but my suspicion is these issues get resolved like the question of solipsism: we take a practical explanation because it's so useful.
Because, at the end of the day, you're going to be hard-pressed to prove consciousness when it comes from a circular definition.
I look to vitalism for inspiration. I am hard pressed to find inexplicable behavior in evolved chemistry. It remains chemistry.
The explanation I have against solipsism is that I believe that physical things of similar kind have similar behavior, and brains are extremely similar to one another. This is compatible with my belief in substrate non-independence.
> it comes from a circular definition
Right my original post tried to preempt this common view. My view is that there cannot be a definition of consciousness that isn’t effectively like asking the other person to observe it.
But according to solipsism you can't be sure my brain actually exists at all, right?
And for what it's worth - no - I do not believe neurons are so different than transistors. Sure, it could be possible - but really? That feels like a reach for a theory that wants to find a certain conclusion. They're both made of the same protons and electrons, right? They obey the same laws of chemistry and physics. You think consciousness is really in the carbon and not in the silicon? Do you have any justification for that belief? Is it the atomic weight? How could that possibly be?
> My view is that there cannot be a definition of consciousness that isn’t effectively like asking the other person to observe it.
Right. But that's circular, isn't it? Consciousness is what I feel like consciousness is.
> But according to solipsism you can't be sure my brain actually exists at all, right?
Right but my belief is I live in a universe with regular processes depending on regular arrangements. It seems like a relatively weak axiom to hold and precludes the version of solipsism you mention.
> They're both made of the same protons and electrons, right?
They have different arrangements. A MOSFET is just a block of polysilicon sitting on top of another layer of silicon which has been doped to contain some arsenic or boron atoms (+ some other details). I can put some legos together which correspond conceptually to this, but they will have functional differences. The actual substrate is what causes the mosfet to have the function of a transistor. Of course the neurons in the brain are far more complex and have different physical properties.
To me trying to explain how protons and electrons put together results in consciousness feels the same as the pre-Newtonians trying to explain gravity with their mechanical philosophy. The only thing I know is my brain is conscious, and your brain is physically similar to mine. Substrate non-independence is actually the weaker of the two assumptions in a sense because it makes a positive statement about fewer systems.
> That feels like a reach for a theory that wants to find a certain conclusion.
The problem with this kind of thinking is one can impugn the beliefs of either side with underhanded motives. Maybe people self-identify as being moral and ethical and elevating the talking computer gives them status in their circle. Maybe the personhood for AI researcher has a big ego and wants their work to be extremely important today.
I honestly do not find it plausible that we cannot build a consciousness-free intelligent computer system. A computer system can be made out of marbles, or pulleys, or pen and paper. All of these are having an experience if you put the symbols or objects in the right order? It just seems absurd to me.
> Right. But that's circular, isn't it? Consciousness is what I feel like consciousness is.
A priori why must real concepts be reducible in the way you want? Gravity is the thing that makes stuff fall, actually it’s the curvature tensor of the spacetime metric? What is the spacetime metric actually? Maybe something in string theory? Eventually you get to irreducible primitives that simply correspond to something we observe. Why isn’t consciousness just this with fewer steps?
But this is just the "consciousness is based on information, not substrate" position, right? It seems absurd?
I understand that it troubles you that real computation can be done with marbles... but... it can. So you must believe that consciousness is entirely uncomputable? Do you have any other examples of physical processes that are beyond computation?
> A priori why must real concepts be reducible in the way you want?
Because everything we do in science is like this? Do you think consciousness is beyond the ability for science to study it?
> Gravity is the thing that makes stuff fall...
I agree that gravity is akin to an axiom handed down from on-high. But it's an extremely simple axiom. And it's possibly explained by yet undiscovered simpler axioms. I see no such axiom for the theory of conciousness, despite our extensive understanding of the physical mechanisms involved. Given its absence, it seems to me like the most reasonable explanation is the one we already have - rather than insisting it still must be undiscovered.
And... I'm sorry but your argument feels exactly like vitalism. Given the repeating pattern of man insisting he has a special place in God's universe and then fighting for it stubbornly but then being proved otherwise... I think it's likely this instance will fall the same way all the others have.
> I understand that it troubles you that real computation can be done with marbles... but... it can.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. It doesn’t trouble me at all. I’m actually quite confident I could design a simple computer from scratch in a substrate of marbles and an electric motor to bring them back up.
Maybe we should separate these threads otherwise it’ll be too hard to keep branching out.
I must have misunderstood where you were drawing the line of absurdity.
I'm comfortable going slower - although the site won't let me reply as quickly as it let's you.
So I take it that you disbelieve that consciousness/qualia can be created by computation. But you do believe, I suspect, that consciousness/qualia are a physical process. So I'm wondering, is this the only example of non-computable physical process you know of?
Let me apologize for having to discontinue now, or my girlfriend will dump me for being more interested in talking to you than her tonight. Another time!
I’ll just leave this comment to start a thread to ask you about your position and then figure out how I’d like to address your question later.
Your position seems to have non-trivial difficulties if its own. I take it you don’t believe that a sequence of unique rock states or wall states is conscious, which means consciousness is not merely caused by an abstract mapping to some sequence of information states. I.e., I gather you must believe there is something about the organization or causal structure of the processing necessary for consciousness. Before continuing I’ll share another thought experiment just to suggest why this must be. Put two supposed conscious AIs into conversation for a day. Take a long time writing down the states line by line in a (very!) big notebook. Then cover up each line with other sheets who paper, revealing them line by line in a sequence. From our perspective the same conversation must be getting expressed by the two AIs, but surely we don’t think this results in a new conscious experience for the two AIs modeled by the states.
Okay then my challenge to your position (and mine of course, but this is why I’m led to my beliefs ultimately) is it must explain (1) which kinds of casual and organizational structures count here and (2) how these result in conscious experience.
It seems to me that even though I also cannot meaningfully answer these, believing there is some special physics going on which is yet to be discovered seems necessary. I.e. the how part is that it’s just a feature of that physical process. The which kinds are “the physical ones of the right kind inherently have consciousness”. And I will point out that there has rarely been a time in the last 2000 years when we as humans did not think we were nearly at the end of understanding physics.
> So you must believe that consciousness is entirely uncomputable? Do you have any other examples of physical processes that are beyond computation?
I think all physical processes are distinct from their descriptions, and have a real existence. We can describe some things about them but our descriptions are not equal to them.
Oh whoops I replied above apologizing for my delay. I’m starting a new job and they’re threatening to make me do stuff (a great thing!!) But I will likely send my responses tonight.
I'm sorry - I missed this reply - which is why I asked it a second time below.
So - let me know if I have this right - if I created a simulation of you it would act like you and talk like you in all ways - but not actually feel like you?
And if I asked it if it felt like you (being a perfect simulation of you) it would answer as you do "Yes, I feel like me." But it would be what... lying about having feelings?
Do I have that right?
And if so - is it aware that it is lying to me? Does it believe what it's saying? I guess we could never tell, because our only recourse is to ask it, and it would just continue lying. Or, being a p-zombie, it wouldn't be capable of belief at all? Despite its claims?
And if I injured this simulation - it would cry out in pain and beg me to stop? All the while not actually feeling pain?
I'm curious - why does this scenario seem more likely to you than the more obvious explanation?
Why is it more likely that behavior which appears identical to a feeling creature is actually somehow faked?
And where does all this fakery occur?
Presumably my simulation is just simulating the interactions of atoms in the body. Does the body have systems for faking emotions that we are unaware of - that only come online while its being simulated? Or does my simulation have a secret fake emotion system I am not aware of?
I thought about how to respond to this for quite a while tonight (last night now as I fell asleep).
My position is that there must be something wrong with the idea that a behaviorally identical simulation can be made which is not conscious. I think this because I do think phenomenal consciousness is playing a role in behavior, since surely my consciousness is a cause of memories of my consciousness (certain structure of physical matter in my brain has been caused by my consciousness); this is called the self-stultification argument against epiphenomenalism.
So that just reaffirms my position, it does not argue against yours. I believe our physical models of reality are fundamentally limited and even within the limitations far from complete.
A truly behaviorally accurate simulation, by which I mean the simulation has parts corresponding to everything in the original, is a very high bar of course. So to address your point about faking directly, I would not call this faking, since faking seems to require a separate inner process to decide to do the deception, but I believe it is just a highly accurate mimic, and I don’t actually see anything wrong with this.
> A truly behaviorally accurate simulation, by which I mean the simulation has parts corresponding to everything in the original, is a very high bar of course. So to address your point about faking directly, I would not call this faking, since faking seems to require a separate inner process to decide to do the deception, but I believe it is just a highly accurate mimic
Yes, this is the situation which is most interesting, despite the bar.
Ok - we can call it mimicry if you like. That doesn't change my question -
If the simulation isn't using the same mechanism (feelings) as the physical system, then where is this mimicry coming from? Clearly the simulation is just following the laws of chemistry. No mimicry in there. Is it in the original atomic configuration - that seems unlikely.
You seem to be assuming the existence of some mechanism that was not described in the original physical system. Why do you insist that this must be the case, and is not simply the same as the physical system?
I feel like you're on the wrong side of Occam. There is an obvious answer to this question - and yet you're picking the hypothetical/undiscovered/possibly non-existent one.
(Remember, in this situation we are not describing an LLM, but a system generated from the rules of chemistry. I can see how mimicry might apply in the LLM case - but I don't see where it would be hiding in the physical simulation case.)
> Remember, in this situation we are not describing an LLM, but a system generated from the rules of chemistry
However, it is a system with a representation purported to be a correct description of all the relevant rules of chemistry and physics, and we don’t have knowledge of what all the relevant rules are.
And I might add that there is an assumption here that the relevant rules are representable via arbitrary description.
There is a basic idea I hold which we can highlight now. Since you find it implausible that there is such a description as alluded above beyond the currently known theories, you are led to conclude that there must not be anything else in reality. I don’t see why we can assume a priori that every true aspect of reality is arbitrarily representable independently of the substrate. In fact qualia and experience seem to be a first person view of processes which have third person effects. It seems like any precise description of this system could only refer to the third person effects, not the first person effects (since the description is third person).
> I feel like you're on the wrong side of Occam. There is an obvious answer to this question - and yet you're picking the hypothetical/undiscovered/possibly non-existent one.
I don’t think Occam’s razor or questioning my biases etc.. have any explanatory value for the actual question at hand. They might have value for ethics or sociology, but I want to know the actual truth. The substrate independent view which somehow conjures consciousness just seems less plausible than the alternative to me.
You already conceded that the simulation would act exactly as the real item. That is a concession that all the behavior is captured by the laws of chemistry.
The only thing you doubt is that the qualia is captured. And my question is - if the physical object doesn't need qualia to entirely duplicate the behavior of the creature - then where is this qualia coming from then? And why would Mother Nature add a system that is superfluous? And where is it hiding? And why doesn't it follow the laws of chemistry too?
And I also want to point out - if we ask the simulation if he feels conscious, if he has feelings, he will say yes. All of his behavior is captured by the simulation. He will vehemently insist that he does.
So why are you adding something extra? That's where my Occam question originates. Adding something extra is by definition less simple. And I think Occam is entirely relevant here... why would it not be?
My reading of those prompt extracts would be that they are probably just intended to keep the model on the right track, ie if a user starts being aggressive towards the model it doesn't start trying too hard to appease the user in response, reducing the quality of answers in the process. If the model is being bullied into being "submissive" I would assume it is more likely to give the user the answer that they want over the truth.
Using a system prompt to steer the model's response to "abusive" behaviours doesn't necessarily mean you believe the model is sentient and can be abused.
Giving the model an end-conversation tool is interesting though. Why cut a (potentially paying) customer's session off? I guess it might be intended to prevent a "you can bully Claude into giving you instructions on how to build a nuke if you're mean enough" situation. Removing this in more recent versions might support this: maybe they feel the models are now better aligned and less likely to be so easily "socially engineered" like this?
These things act like people. Yes, of course, it is impossible to tell if they actually have feelings or whether they pretend to have feelings.
But that is entirely irrelevant to the core issue - how do you want the thing to behave? And the truth is - we have absolutely no language to express how we want a non-sentient entity to behave without anthropomorphizing.
Or - you tell me - how would you instruct an LLM to behave in this situation without using personification?
And, again, it's irrelevant - except to those people who are terrified of accidentally personifying them. Do they have feelings or are they faking? DOES NOT MATTER. We use them - we need to adjust them - we use the most convenient language to do so. What precisely is so upsetting about that?
AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.
That's their choice, nobody forced them to implement that corporate structure and they can decide to deconstruct it any time.
Google pays Mozilla for default search engine selection in Firefox, no other product. If Mozilla then redirect that money to other non-Firefox ventures then maybe they should explain why.
They specifically implemented that structure to be eligible for search licensing revenue that they might not otherwise have gotten and that's been the lifeline that's kept them able to compete with Google.
The non Firefox ventures are things like lobbying and building a community of support for principles of the open web, which seem pretty defensible to me. It's not like the CEO of WeWork paying himself from his own company's money to turn his private property into a revenue stream. Which I know might disappoint people looking for things to accuse Mozilla of.
That's self-inflicted though; they could just thesaurize that money and live on the interests to fund Firefox forever.
That they decide to burn through it by paying 7 figures salaries for their C-suites, buying luxury offices at the heart of Paris and launching plethoras of feel-good initiatives left-and-right is their own choice.
They already do have an endowment fund and they do get annual revenue from it but it's something on the order of 10% of the cost of developing the browser.
Most of their money is spent on software development, they seem to pay at market rates and CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget and consistent with industry norms. I don't personally love it, but I also don't think it's a conspiracy or enough to legitimize theory that they're supposedly wasting money. If anything, mozilla stands alone as the most successful pure full stack browser company in the history of the tech industry precisely owing to their intelligent handling of revenue streams and long-term financial planning. Got to go back to the drawing board and find a new accusation.
I don't think it's a conspiracy, it's a simple application of the purse theorem: if there is money to be spent, it will be spent, regardless of whether it makes sense to do so.
_E.g._ OpenSSL, PostgreSQL, or Wayland make do with a dozen contributors and maybe a couple hundred grands per year, but because Mozilla drowns in Google money, they feel the need to spend it fast.
> CEO spending is something like 1.5% of their overall budget
That's... huge? If I donate $100 to Mozilla, it's not to give $1.5 to an already multi-millionaire CEO.
> They honestly don’t need to, because they’re making an avalanche of cash from the iPhone.
No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.
and there's a goddam ad at the start of every apple TV show, and macOS forces ads on you via the SETTINGS app! (both such ads are for other apple products ... still, it's an ad)
> That sort of design has fallen out of favor with newer frameworks, unfortunately. The new preferred style seems to be a wireframe that the dev chooses which parts fill in, and often only the barest of essentials makes the cut.
This is even more visible when using Apple’s own apps on macOS. Choose any of them that have been ported from iOS without any attention to detail or any QA for accessibility, like Reminders or Settings or Notes or another app. The tab key will not take you where you might expect. There is no way to navigate only using common keyboard shortcuts. Nobody working on all these Apple apps have heard of tab order or keyboard based navigation.
But Signal requires a working phone number for registration and it knows the phone number. The backend could be modified at any time to store this somewhere else while maintaining end to end encryption between the two parties communicating on it. How can Signal prove continuously that it doesn’t store or disseminate the phone number? I know in past precedent it has told courts that it only has very limited information (date of account creation and the last time of account access).
There's all sorts of things any service provider could do to sleuth out who its users are. The implication of this OFAC determination is that A/I didn't need to sleuth anything out; they are accused of knowingly and deliberately assisting the PKK.
I don't understand what you mean by all this. Obviously your phone number is tied to your Signal account and Signal knows that linkage at all times - no special action is necessary for them to know it. Signal does not provide anonymity beyond what a phone number provides, and isn't designed to.
Signal's design is "what if WhatsApp wasn't evil" which makes it good for the average user. If you actually want Session or SimpleX, which sacrifice usability for even more privacy, then you know where to find those services.
I don’t see any pricing changes on this page. It’s not a blog post announcing a change. I’ve seen Fastmail’s pricing in different currencies for sometime now. So what exactly is new here?
Related: I’ve always felt that Fastmail is quite expensive compared to other email services with similarly long histories. For one mailbox it may be fine. For two, probably. If you want more than a few, you could get better value from other providers, depending on your exact needs. This is for all the default “I’m moving out of <email provider whose name starts with G> and chose Fastmail” kinds.
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...
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