Yeah, great. A search engine that will somehow require me to buy Apple hardware.
I dislike Apple. I'll never buy Apple. But Apple might just create the best search engine there is, with the right incentives.
Can you rephrase this sentence? There's a point you're making in this sentence that I'm not getting, and I would like to. Thanks
My bad.
And that's exactly what I intend to do. If something is masquerading as free but uses that to actually sell my attention/trust to other parties, then I don't see why I can't masquerade as a client that's willing to be subjected to that but only takes the functionality. Make your cost upfront and clear and I will pay upfront and clear. If your business model involves a high degree of obscurity, my consumer behaviour will, as well.
Put it another way - is it theft to go to a company meeting where they serve pizza, just for the pizza?
The more I make use of the ads, the more I contribute financially (either directly or indirectly) to the bottom line of the content provider, the more I support them. So when I gloss over those ads without fully engaging with them, am I then committing theft as well?
Invoking a "moral" argument about theft here, begs the question, are ads themselves moral? When I read site X, I am not thinking "and as a nice side bonus, it would be cool if they could throw in a side bar making me aware of a miracle drug that will cure my insecurity by the size of my penis." The whole point of ads is basically to trick/deceive me into buying something I had no intention of purchasing originally. Is that not theft?
I know "two wrongs don't make a right", but since morality is relative these days anyway, when I enter a market place (which is what the ad driven economy is) where the whole point is a contest between will you trick me into buying this or not, I figure it's survival of the trickiest.
There is a link at the top of this page.
How do I know whether it's riddled with trackers and obnoxious advertising based on that link? Yes, I can see it's Forbes so it's likely pretty bad. Am I supposed to keep an internal dictionary of link knowledge in my head for the hundreds of sites I interact with on a give week and "Vote with my wallet?" every time I click a link? That's ridiculous.
If they want, they can require me to answer a question about the ads they served before sending me content. Or they can put EULA in front of their content.
I took the above information and hazarded an educated guess that Apple probably won't pivot into the ad business and attempt to compete against Google with a conventional ad-driven search engine. They might do that, but I think it's less likely.
iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Maps, for instance, are all accessible from the web.
Edit: Also, this is a lot of jumping to conclusions, Google can be used on any device, if Apple wants to compete, it will be usable on any device.
For instance, when Apple Maps uses user devices to update it's map data like Waze does:
>“We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.
Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
It also enables Apple Ad tracking by default on iOS / iPadOS so please don't mix Apples' marketing with actual state of things in the world :/
- As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.
- As for Music, the web player is completely fine. Not any less optimized than the Apple device versions. Would actually go further and say it looks MORE optimized than the mess of iTunes/"Music" on the Mac. Apple's native music app on the Mac has never been good.
- As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it. Haven't seen a windows app variant either.
Edit: made it easier to read
Also, Windows lets you login into your iCloud account without the iCloud client, so you can still have your iCloud calendar (and emails) in the stock apps. I don't use the iCloud client because I don't use it to store files, but I still have my calendars and emails synced on my Windows desktop.
As for Maps, they don't really have a consumer facing web client, but they do let other websites embed Apple Maps. DuckDuckGo, for instance, uses Apple Maps for their maps.
You can certainly buy televisions that have built in support for 4K, HDR, and Apple TV.
>As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.
You can access your calendar and all the rest of iCloud directly through any web browser. Including productivity apps like Pages.
>As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it.
DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead of Google Maps now.