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Comment by WoodenChair | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons I pay a premium to use Apple's products is to not be part of an advertising ecosystem. I am disappointed that this seems to be changing. Ads in the App Store are one thing—ads in Maps, Books, and Podcasts as the article suggests may be coming in the future—will drive me to use premium (even if they're paid) alternatives. At a minimum, people who pay for an Apple monthly iCloud subscription should be able to opt-out (not just of tracking, which already exists, but seeing ads all together).

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I feel the same way. I thought the price premiums we pay on hardware and services is supposed to support profit margins that allow Apple to not show advertisements to me.

If the prior profits were not enough, how much higher do the prices need to be to not do this?

In general I trust the company to make choices about computing experiences, much more so than any other products company. So, I am going to try and hold judgement and see how this pans out.

That said, I'd like the company to get out ahead of these decisions and explain reasoning for these changes.

Regardless of how much the hardware and services already cost, the company can always make more by showing ads too? Meaning, no profits or prices are high enough.

(Unless they show far too many so people start leaving ... That threshold might be high though; Linux is too cumbersome for almost everyone?)

I think being the richest company in the world makes it pretty cleat that there’s no need to increase prices to support no ads. It’s pure greed and you can’t reason with it.

This gets to the biggest existential threat I suspect faces Apple.

Because it is fundamentally a public company rooted in capitalism, the company is vulnerable to another type of products organization.

One that is similar to a Purpose Trust and not held captive to polluting their own customer experience to reward uninvolved “capital investors.”

It is almost like the business form of RISC-V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purpose_trust

> At a minimum, people who pay for an Apple monthly iCloud subscription should be able to opt-out (not just of tracking, which already exists, but seeing ads all together).

The premium is just an opt-out of the ads (on the specific app) .... the tracking is where the value will be in the future

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