Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

I get Apple are looking at doing this tastefully but this is a slippery slope where bean-counters realise they can get extra revenue for little effort. Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles — except Apple upselling their own services and I’m honest not ok with that either.

If I wanted my hardware to be subsidised by advertisers then I’d have stuck with Android.

View on HN

> Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles

The App Store is already filled with paid search results.

I don’t really use the App Store at all, so that bothers me less. I use maps almost every day.

"First they came for..."

I know. Hence this being a slippery slope.

I could probably have made my point clearer though.

And it's a terrible low quality experience. I feel dirty after having typed in the literal name of an app and being subjected to a FULL PAGE AD for another, scummy one.

This used to be true, but they have been focusing very heavily on services, and on ads to a lesser degree for quite a few years to pursue greater profits. & It's clear that this trend will not stop.

> Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles

I pay for Apple One and I am furious about their ham fisted inclusion of easily the lowest quality ads in Apple News Premium, and to have included them to such a degree that they are a major distraction.

Tim Cook is a bean counter.

His one significant win as a CEO was making the profit margins on apple processors higher.

AirPods are the biggest surprise runaway success under Tim Cook

Really? That was his one significant win? It wasn't taking Apple from a $350B market cap (the peak of Apple's market cap under the previous CEO) to a $3.5T market cap?

Right, so you're grading it on bean counting.

Importantly, the NASDAQ also had a 9-10x increase in this period, so while Apple did grow, it's not exploding benchmarks under his tenure as far as I see it.

They already started this slippery slope with the stocks application.

I paid a premium for Apple hardware in part to not have this nonsense, yet they did it anyway after the fact. :/

The News app is less of a slippery slope and more like a vertical waterslide.

Unlike every other company that does this you're paying the premium and they aren't even subsidizing the hardware costs.

What part of a Pixel is subsidized by advertisers? Are you one of those people that ridiculously believe flagship and midrange Android phones are plastered with ads? Have you even used an Android phone recently?

Ironically, I use an Android device because I resent looking at ads.

I never get YouTube ads (plus I have SponsorBlock among other features), I get no ads or paywalls on my browser (which support Ublock Origin and BypassPaywallsClean), none of my social media apps have ads and most are open source clients, etc.

I haven't seen a single ad on my phone in ages, and that's why I can't part with Android (for now).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com