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I miss the days when Jobs would tell shareholders to pound sand rather than make product compromises.

Under Tim Cook, there is no possible way things will get better, and I suspect they will get much worse. They'll continue making whatever comprises to the user experience are necessary to obtain quarterly growth. And the more difficult that becomes, the more drastic and user hostile the changes will be.

It's bizarrely short-sighted, and I can't figure out why. I mean there are several videos of Steve Jobs himself warning about this exact trajectory, and I'm sure Tim Cook must have seen them.

Unfortunately, Tim Cook does not have the force of personality to stop it. Nobody does. Only Steve Jobs could do it, and that is likely exclusively down to the fact (whether you consider it as such or not is beside the point) that he saved Apple. The fact is, if you tell the shareholders no too frequently, you stop being in charge. And even if the next guy shares your vision, will his replacement? How many CEOs does it take until you get someone who will pursue short-term profit at any long-term cost?

Tim caused ads, so Tim doesn't need the force of personality to stop ads.

Tim wants ads. Tim is a money guy, not a product guy.

CEOs have force, be it personality or investiture by the board.

No, if Cook fails to "stop" ads that's pretty clearly evidence he's okay with them.

And if everyone is doing it to scrape more profit, then there are few options to turn to protest with your consumption habits.

I pay Apple $20 a month for Apple One. I refuse to pay and see ads at the same time.

If I am going to see only 1 ad in a normal Apple app (Maps, Music, Podcasts etc.) Apple can kiss that money goodbye.

For every Apple Service there’s a good alternative. I’ll turn my iPhone into a piece of Apple hardware with minimal affiliation to Apple software within the afternoon.

From there on out, I’ll start investigating to replace my Apple hardware with alternatives at their next renewal cycle.

For Apple end users, Tim Cook is the worst CEO you could imagine. A human Excel sheet.

Is Tim Cook really the problem? Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of directors first, and Tim Cook can only stay CEO as long as he's acting in their interests. Maybe it's too easy to blame the system, but I don't see how Tim Cook should take the majority blame.

> Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of directors first, and Tim Cook can only stay CEO as long as he's acting in their interests.

And it is his job to explain to them that plastering ads all over the UI is going to destroy the entire privacy-conscious image that Apple has built up over the past decade, specially the past five or so years.

You can't just say "There was no alternative but to show ads", it's a reductio ad (lol) absurdum by which you can excuse any bad decisions that a CEO makes by saying "Well, the board made them do it".

Apple has to answer to the shareholders and board of directors first

First, no. That's a gross oversimplification of the situation, and there are thousands of counter-examples. It's one of those things people see on HN and then pass along as if it was the absolute truth. It isn't.

But, for fun, let's pretend it is true. Then the way Tim Cook answers to shareholders is to preserve the long-term value of Apple as a brand and a company, and not to sell out for short-term gains.

The majority of Apple shareholders are massive corporations that invest for the long-haul, not day traders trying to make a quick buck.

The problem goes deeper and is one we see everywhere- the stock price has to always go up. This is only good for shareholders, for everyone else it is usually bad. How does humanity solve this feedback loop? The free market dream doesn't seem to be working.

If not him, then who? Ultimately he is the one who makes the decisions; that's why he has the title of CEO and not "Puppet Of The Board."

I suppose we could simply blame the entire customer base of Apple, but that seems less than productive.

If I am going to see only 1 ad in a normal Apple app (Maps, Music, Podcasts etc.) Apple can kiss that money goodbye.

Don't open Settings, then. There's been ads in there for three years.

Only one I've seen for a while is the one trying to get me to try Apple Arcade for free for 3 months. I don't know how long I have to ignore it before they get the message that I barely game on my phone and tablets, don't want to game on them more than I do, and have no interest whatsoever in the service.

But yeah, it's an ad. At least you can dismiss it. Dunno how long it'll stay gone (this just prompted me to go tell it "not now", so we'll see).

This new “not now” rhetoric is annoying me so much. It is so user-unfriendly to deny them the definitive in their decision. These dark patterns creep in anywhere that I get the impression that every eco-system and operating system becomes actively hostile to the user.

"A human Excel sheet" is the phrase I need but cannot find for some people I know. Thanks (:

> It's not the premium experience I'm looking for (and paying for).

This is the only way to feel about it: it's un-premium.

Yeah I see ads as the biggest threat to my future in their ecosystem. It's a revenue stream that seems to so reliably ruin any company that dips more than the tiniest bit of a toe into it. Which sucks because they're by such a large margin the least-bad option that I hate to be stuck with any of the alternatives. Of which the largest (Microsoft, Google) are at least as bad on the advertising front, so that leaves me with... Linux. And just no remotely-OK solution for phones and tablets, at all. I have so very little interesting in "tinkering" with those platforms.

Damnit, Microsoft, why'd you have to ruin your OS with ad and spying garbage and shittifying your calculator and notepad apps et c. just as you were starting to add useful stuff like WSL that might have made it a viable OS for actual work and not just playing video games?

So I guess it's Linux. Ugh. Or maybe the FreeBSD driver situation will get better before then and I can use that. That'd be... fine, I guess.

> Currently I'm incessed by Zoom showing me ads after calls even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it.

Zoom has plenty of competitors that don't show ads after calls. Try a few out. Some of them are a much better experience for participants and hosts alike.

It's so tough taking stances to defend things of 'intangible' (or at least hard to quantify) value like Apple has. I worry it's almost 'inevitable' for companies to cave in.

> Currently I'm incensed by Zoom showing me ads after calls even though I pay for it monthly, I wish I could drop it.

I use Meet extensively across my professional engagements with GSuite/Workspace. Works great. No ads.

Meet is Google's product right? So you're sure your not targeted after you mentioned things in a call?

Back to the time of sculley.

Zoom shows ads now?

They have in-app ads like this: https://cs.joshstrange.com/zTpdlC (Note: dismissing this does next to nothing, it's back almost every day or at least as often as Zoom restarts)

And then post-meeting popup ads (that are always on top until you dismiss them) like this: https://cs.joshstrange.com/BizVwE

I've gone through almost all the settings I could think of but I don't see a way to disable it. I pay monthly for Zoom and I'm logged into that account. I find it beyond the pale that Zoom wastes my time/energy in this way especially since most ads are about a product I will never use. If I need a tool to run a 500+ person webinar my life has taken a horrible turn, and if I did I wouldn't use Zoom since they do crap like this.

Huh, I can't recall seeing those and maybe it's because we have an "enterprise" account but wowo.