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Microsoft's Weather app now shows more ads

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53 pointsspeckx77 comments

Considering retail for the OS is $199 I find it insane the way Microsoft is pushing such a dystopian freemium model on their users. When you buy a new computer with Windows, the manufacturer pays Microsoft for that license too (obj not the same cost as a retail one, but a cost nonetheless)

Meanwhile essentially every version of macOS is free (gotta go back a few years to find retail upgrade copies, which are still far less expensive than Windows and never contain advertisements)

MacOS does show advertisements for the iCloud services.

I think… in settings? Once below Apple ID, if you’re not signed in, and once by iCloud. There also are AppleID and iCloud direct integrations, which can be thought of as advertisements. And if you are using iCloud and there’s not enough space, you’ll see a banner on every app that uses iCloud (except Finder) that hey, there’s not enough space.

I think this is an advertisement, but it’s for a service people might actually want, that doesn’t necessarily cost money, and only asks for money when needed for functionality. It’s also a first-party ad.

> but it’s for a service people might actually want

copium

> I think this is an advertisement, but it’s for a service people might actually want

I don't think that's what makes Apple's in-OS ads acceptable. Whether somebody "actually wants" iCould or whatever, is dependent on that person. What makes Apple's in-OS ads acceptable are that they are for Apple services that are totally in-context to where you are in the OS: an "ad" for iCloud appears in the Settings dialog hierarchy where iCloud settings would normally be. Also, they are really subtle and hard to notice, tastefully integrated with the OS/color scheme.

Unlike Microsoft's ham-fisted ads that are in your face, thrown into the Start menu without any context, for services that have nothing to do with what you're doing, and design-wise garish and tacky: I'm in the middle of launching a text editor, and Microsoft shouts "BUY CANDY CRUSH LOLOLOLOL" with a blinding ad.

Big difference.

The problem is that difference is shrinking. Compare the ad creep between Windows 7 and 11. Now, compare Apple's first party ads between iPhone 5 vs the current iOS (not familiar enough w MacOS). Apple Music's full screen modal ads suck but I guess it's better than forcing a U2 album on us. And the iCloud ads to upgrade your space may be "subtle and integrated with the colors and less garish," but they're not just in the Settings. I'm getting iCloud reminder emails and Notifications multiple times a day, it's not much better. MS's are more ham-fisted and garish, sure, but the sad thing is watching the enshittification of iOS and society's expectations also.

>an "ad" for iCloud appears in the Settings dialog hierarchy where iCloud settings would normally be. Also, they are really subtle and hard to notice, tastefully integrated with the OS/color scheme.

Okay. But can they be permanently disabled?

Windows' OneDrive ads can be disabled, FWIW. There's a switch for almost everything in Windows (which doesn't excuse the shitty defaults, but still).

The "ads" on a mac are a drop in the ocean compared to the experience on Windows.

macOS being free is sleight of hand. The cost is just baked into the margin on their hardware. Maybe if you could run macOS on hardware of your choice (i.e. "hackintosh") it would be an apples-to-apples comparison.

> The cost is just baked into the margin on their hardware.

Oh no! Wait, why is this somehow a concern? You buy a Mac and get an OS with years worth of free updates to that OS and additional years of security updates to the OS. Where's the problem?

There's no problem. It's just the same model as Microsoft with the only difference that Microsoft works with an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers vs. being the sole one.

If I buy a laptop from Dell the cost of Windows is also baked into their margin. And you equally get years worth of free updates. The point is that "MacOS is free, Windows costs money" is a bad comparison both from the end-user PoV and the actual economics of what's happening.

GNU/Linux is Free as in Freedom, Windows is free as in free beer, MacOS is free as in free airplane pretzels.

Except that Windows and macOS aren't $0 free, they just get included with hardware so people don't see the cost.

This comparison has never made sense to me. If I get a free beer, I can do whatever I want with it. Drink it, dump it, whatever. Same thing with pretzels. Am I missing something?

Yes

To get free _airplane_ pretzels you need to first be on an airplane, which means you need to buy an airplane ticket, which costs hundreds.

Similar with free beer. You need to do _something_ to get the free beer. It will probably cost less than the airline ticket, but it will still cost.

> Meanwhile essentially every version of macOS is free

If that was true I could download a macOS version to run in my VM. Rather macOS is unavailable, the only way to get a valid license is to buy a machine running MacOS. Which isn't that different from buying a Windows PC.

The only reason no money changes hands from OEM to Apple is that Apple makes both the OS and the hardware, and they don't have a reason to pay money to themselves.

Windows upgrades used to be a big thing, but have been effectively free for the last 8 years.

You can virtualise macOS (in Fusion) from the installer from the App Store, which is just a .app you can get anyone to download

In Europe there is no reason to pay $199. You can buy a second hand Windows 11 Pro license for $10. Office Pro for $25.

Despite what many will say, it's completely legal, EU highest court ruled that companies can't forbid the transfer/re-sale of legitimately owned software licenses.

> Office Pro for $25

Really? I’ve seen OEM Windows licenses for about €15 on a German website (IIRC the practice of selling them was specifically declared legal in Germany), but Office went for €50 there.

Not in EU, but I've bought from keysfan and godeal24 a few times and was always satisfied. I would never use it for a business, but for home use it's been just fine.

You got to search a bit more, look outside Germany too. It's legal in all of EU.

I have never received a single code from any reseller that wasn’t being sold to multiple people, resulting in blocks.

You don't know how to pick the resellers than.

All the legitimate ones guarantee that the license will work and they will replace it for free if you have any problems with it.

There are big online computer shops which also resell licenses. They have names, addresses, thousands of customers. If you have a problem with a second-hand license bought there you can make a consumer complaint to the authorities.

Well I’m more than interested in hearing what these legitimate partners are because every single one I’ve used was either not a valid key but secretly an upgrade key, or being sold multiple times.

I believe $199 would be for Windows 10/11 Pro, not Home.

Which a) you probably don't need and b) actually has better options to get rid of ads etc.

The retail price here for Windows 10/11 Home is around $110.

Mac OS X Tiger for example was also around $129 (but yes, this was a long time ago). Then ago, you obviously already pay premium for the Apple hardware. And maybe also sign up for their services.

You need a pro version in order to be allowed to sign into your own computer with your own user and not involving the internet.

The more people who use Linux, the more software will be available to use. If you are in any way technical, do society a favor and switch to Linux.

You'll know we hit it big when malicious actors start developing more threats against Linux.

Most servers already run gnu/linux, and are juicier targets than the average consumer device. The incentives are already huge.

I have to pay my bills today, not whenever the professional software I use gets released on Linux. Also, the Linux experience is so miserable that if Windows were to die, I'd just switch to MacOS tbh.

When was the last time you tried it?

And get confronted with Apple’s version of enshittification? The grass is not as green as it used to be in cupertino world.

I have a M1 laptop so I kinda suffered some aspects of MacOS. But, when I have a problem, it just feels like this:

Windows: Chances are the problem doesn't exist.

Linux: Spend 6 hours to fix it.

MacOS: Spend 50$ for software that fixes it.

Apple has a long ways to go before they get to Microsoft levels of enshittification. The News app has ads and premium-only content mixed into the content you do have access to. They know I don't pay for News so stop showing me the articles I can't read, please. I know that's the whole point. They want me to get annoyed and pay for it. And I think there are random nudges throughout the OS to pay for iCloud. But it's a far cry from the ads and clickbait and unwanted notifications and resetting user preferences (Edge browser, etc.) that Windows does.

Genuinely curious to what makes it miserable. I mostly love my basic Ubuntu setup (and especially compared to the clown show that is modern Windows), and although I’m a software engineer I am neither particularly good at nor have any interest in tinkering with my Linux setup. It mostly just works (except for distribution of apps outside of the package manager - that sucks!). That said, I’m on desktop - I think anything with batteries and touch interfaces is often more buggy.

I wouldn't say miserable, but there are sharp edges that don't exist in Windows or MacOS. I've been steadily getting annoyed at Windows so I've started trialing my steam deck as a desktop replacement when I travel. It's mostly fine. But the lack of ability to set scroll wheel speed across the entire OS annoys me every time and after weeks of trying to find a solution, I've learned way more than I should need to about mouse drivers and Wayland and libinput, and I still don't have an acceptable solution to it. Many others have had this issue and each component blames the other for some idealistic reasons. The users don't care. They want to have a mouse experience that just works.

These edge cases are annoying to test and fix and you have to pay smart people to grind out the time to do it. You need program managers who coordinate across teams to drive a solution. This is why linux hasn't solved it after all these years. The smart people would rather work on cool new features.

> The users don't care. They want to have a mouse experience that just works.

I do agree with this and share your pain, even though to me it's never been that bad. But you're right, it's a big blame game between linux, distros, gnome, wayland, etc, and the result is fragmentation. And a ton of users are left in the middle when mom and dad are fighting violently over age-old issues like dynamic linking and which window manager is the best. The fact that linux has a much more narrow scope than commercial OSs has some significant downsides.

Ironically, I get the sense that Torvalds agrees with this, it's just that he can't afford to increase the scope outside of the kernel, which is already a super-human effort. I got the sense he wishes everyone else can iron out their differences, while he (correctly, probably) assumes it's wiser tend to his garden than to get involved in other battles.

excuses excuses

spoken like someone who hasn't used Linux in a decade. The experience is much better in Linux than the other OSes these days

If you need to use software in Windows for work that's one thing, but you probably don't need that software on every personal device and your opinion about using Linux is definitely just your opinion

Even if you do need Windows for your software, projects like Wine are making progress every day. There's only a few things I use that don't work out of the box, and for that I have a stripped down Windows VM.

Learning how to spin up a Windows VM in Linux was what finally gave me the courage to take the training wheels off and abandon Windows as my daily driver, after decades.

> The experience is much better in Linux than the other OSes these days

Until the next system update breaks Wayland or your GPU driver again.

Using debian (and with an upgrade to 12) with gnome feels very polished. I think I'd call it close to a "default" linux experience. That doesn't sound sexy but it means it's the happy path, thoroughly tested, no surprises. The closest thing I've had to an issue in 6 months is extrepo duplicating some repo keys, it was as easy to fix as deleting the file once.

Modern linux can be a boring and productive place if you want it to be.

> Linux experience is so miserable

This is just not true. I switched back to linux recently https://punkx.org/jackdoe/linux-desktop.html and honestly the experience is amazing. I even did dist-upgrade and everything still works, including all my pytorch stuff.

Windows experience is hundreds of times worse.

MacOS is quite good, I would recommend it as well, but don't dismiss linux without trying.

I'm not sure if this is true. Just having people use Linux does not produce or port any software to Linux.

Now you could argue that it increases the market share of Linux, but for that, it needs to be a market, i.e. software vendors need to have a way to monetize. And the question then is if you're not ending up with the same issues you have on closed-source proprietary software.

Generally speaking, I mostly had better experiences with commercial software in my life as a "user", both professionally and in private.

Every time I have to help a friend on Windows, I'm horrified by how even worse it got. The ads, bloatware, the performance, the bugs, and user-hostile philosophy.

They have been too big to fail for too long, but their greed will bite them back one day.

So much stuff has moved to the web anyway that I think a very large percentage of people could move to Linux and it would largely have no negative effects at all.

My sister in law, who is not technical in any way, ran Ubuntu for multiple years (to keep using a Macbook that didn't get any more updates) because virtually everything she did was in the browser anyway; she did her homework with Google Docs, she listened to music with YouTube Music, she talked to her friends with Google Chat or Signal, she did her taxes with TurboTax online.

We can (correctly) complain about how Google is eating the internet, and that's fair, but at least in the regards of making Linux viable, Google has (probably inadvertently) done a very good job.

Unfortunately, I think ads are going to get worse before they get better. The huge hotness in marketing right now is using AI and the trove of data to write personalized ad copy for every recipient. Right now it's expensive enough that not a ton of people are doing it, and the ones who are are only targeting a small niche of people, but I expect that the economics will improve quickly.

Given Microsoft's full dive into gathering personalized information, integrating those collection pipelines deeply into the operating system, and integrating AI into the OS, it seems likely to me that personalized ads are coming to a Windows system near you.

On a related note, gnome weather is minimalist, very lightweight, and entirely ad free.

Windows has had personalized ads for a long time now, they just mask it as "Recommendations". They're in the start menu, the search bar, the task bar, and even your lock screen! I remember many years ago when dynamic lock screen for Windows 10 was turned into a giant ad for Disney's Minions. It's everywhere in the OS.

Just a small correction noting that Disney is not involved with the Minion movies

Interesting, all these years I just assumed Despicable Me was a Pixar property. Never heard of Illumination before but I enjoyed their work on The Super Mario Bros Movie.

The incredible thing is how pain accepting the microsoft user base is. Any other product, people would have switched over or at least trained into alternatives a while ago, just out of spite and to avoid the pain. Why not more people have a linux-vm to alt-tab between, i shall never know. It really shows how far away linux as "desktop" addition, not even replacement really is.

Pain means different things to different people. To date, I've calculated turning off ads in Windows to be less painful than reinstalling a new OS. I've had to find and change settings 3 times in the past 10 or so years, and then 3 times in the past year, but my Windows does not have ads (I also don't use Microsoft aps). This is admittedly galling, but I have a feeling I'd be messing around with Linux settings at a similar or greater rate.

This isn't really an excuse. I've been meaning to get a test install of Linux on my laptop for a while, but I've been putting it off due to the expectation that it will not be a pain-free process to get all my stuff running as I like again.

Will be really interesting to see how people react when the personalized copy reveals a little too much of what the ad platform knows and crosses over into creepy territory.

I'm convinced marketing is one of the most harmful professions to society. Yes, some amount of marketing is important, so people know who you are and what you do. But the number of times our marketing department asked for creepy spyware tracking in order to "better serve our customers" makes me sick to my stomach.

This is true, but I also think software technology corporations play a huge role in accelerating the destruction of society. I'm having a hard time being convinced this boring dystopia we're in right now is all that much better than when we didn't have huge software companies destroying society (mostly Facebook and Google).

I'm a software engineer (of course) but the way corporate software is going is bleak. FOSS sometimes feels like the only light we have. Social media destroyed society, made everyone confused and neutered.

Sorry, slightly off topic rant. But day by day I get increasingly frustrated with where the software industry is going.

Bill Hicks had the right idea about marketers, for sure.

It goes well beyond creepy spyware tracking. The rampant marketing-driven consumerism corrupts the whole culture and society.

Just to nit pick a little, because I don't want to paint the whole profession of Marketing with one terrible brush. These dystopian spyware-tracking-ads are just one of the "four P's" of Marketing: Promotion. And it's not even really Promotion in the traditional sense, it's something much more personally intrusive, not just at people's eyes but into their psychology. It's a two-way communication rather than a one-way "sales pitch." And the return communication (from us to the Marketer) is happening without our consent.

I think we need a fifth P or something: Psychologic Warfare? I don't know, I don't write the Marketing textbooks.

Personalised Advertising products are likely to be short-lived considering the swathe of Privacy legislation that's out there.

And every article like this just convinces me that switching my personal desktop to Linux a couple years ago was the right choice. I do wish that Affinity or another PS competitor had a good Linux or at least WINE support. Seems to be one of the greater gaping holes imo.

We need more professional software for Linux. I can't switch my work PC because Autodesk, Bentley and Dassault products to name a few. Personal machines that just run Firefox and things like handbrake or VM stuff, linux works great.

Yeah... I've found that we've definitely crossed the point where inlaws/grandma can use Linux (if they don't have to service/install themselves) as a daily driver.

Professional apps definitely need work... as I mention, would be nice if a few would at least put a little effort into WINE testing and/or support in order to broaden use. Not even fully porting to Linux. This won't work for all apps, but so many have what are likely minor changes to get compatibility up.

Photoshop is the one kicker for me, too. Nothing comes close. GIMP is a dumpster fire.

Lately I have been doing pretty well with Figma though. Been daily driving Debian 12 w/ KDE for about a year now and it has been rock solid and quite enjoyable.

I never imagined I would ever admit this - but I find myself frustrated by the latency of macOS on my Macbook Air more and more after how instantaneous certain things are on my workstation.

Photopea?

Guess what, Microsoft's Outlook.com shows ads that's 40% of your screen composition.

I'm more upset that the Notification thing on the left taskbar side in Windows 11 seems to have a mind of it's own - sometimes it displays the weather, othertimes the NVDA stock price, now it displays that in 4 hours Spain plays against France in Euro 24.

I just wish it displayed the weather, but it seems to ignore my configuration or I have skill issues.

Only when I am getting paid, must I use Windows. The inefficiencies of Windows is passed to my customer.

At home, for all of my work, I use Fedora.

Poor ancient companies using Windows/Microsoft services. They were too slow to adjust to Microsoft's turn to anti-consumer behavior. Now fortune 50 employees are subjected to Microsoft clickbait.

> Welcome to Ghacks! Consent Management

> We and our [165] partners place cookies, access and use non-sensitive information from your device to improve our products and personalize ads...

Definitely a bit of hypocrisy here. "Company X makes money from ads and that's anti-consumer!" "We make money from ads and that's good."

Just uninstall the Weather app and never see or use it again.

I haven’t had to deal with nearly as much bullshit from Microsoft since I switched to AtlasOS, which is a trimmed down version of Windows.

Then again, I know better than fully trusting a third-party patch for an operating system, of all things… so I only use that for games and absolutely nothing else. My main daily os at the moment is Manjaro.

First time I heard of Atlas OS. How is it different from Windows LTSC?

It does a bunch of things to minimize Windows’ footprint: https://github.com/Atlas-OS/Atlas

Mind you, I don’t agree with some of those, like removing Windows Defender and disabling core isolation. I skipped those during setup.

Great! Now I can keep up to date on recent trends in whatever buckets ad companies keep me on!

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