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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly my own thought process. I don't pretend that Apple is saintly, but their profit model is currently to make money through premium prices on premium products. They have a lot to lose, like several trillion dollars, in betraying that trust.

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A large % of their revenue comes from app store/services and they have incentives to lock you into the ecosystem, sell you digital shit and take a cut off of everything.

I saw an ad for apple gaming service in my iphone system settings recently !

That's not to say that Google isn't worse but let's not pretend Apple is some saint here or that their incentives are perfectly aligned with the users. Hardware growth has peaked, they will be forced to milk you on services to keep growing revenue.

Personally I'm looking forward to Steam Deck, if that gets annoying with SteamOS - it's a PC built for Linux, there's going to be something available.

Ads are only 2-3% of Apple's revenue, while Google is ~75%.

The comment about the ad wasn't about the ad istelf. It was an apple ad for an apple service, so they didn't make any money at all on the ad. The remark was about the service Apple was pushing, and just how intrusively.

Oh but they did achieve a financial good. They saved having to pay another company to place that ad. Therefore, they made more money, eg more profit.

Correct, and didn’t sell your data to do it. I’m okay with that. If I trust Apple with basically my life stored on their phone and in their cloud, and processing payments for me, and filtering my email, and spoofing my mac address on networks (and,and,and), it seems foolish to be worried about them knowing what tv shows I like to watch at night too. At least to me. It’s gonna be a sad day when Tim leaves and user privacy isn’t a company focus anymore.

But the comment OP was replying to was about their ad services and what incentive the company has to operate in good faith or risk impacting sales to the majority of their business.

Services are 25% and are the only one growing/they can grow - that means all focus is going to be on expanding that revenue = enshitification.

Hardware is now purely a way to get you on to the app store - which is why iOS is so locked down and iPad has a MacBook level processor with toy OS.

If you stop looking at the marketing speak and look at it from a stock owner perspective all the user hostile moves Apple is double speaking into security and UX actually make a lot more sense.

Hardware is still 3x the revenue of services, and though it has a lower margin is the bulk of the companies profit. Apple was 3% of the PC market in 2010 and is 10% today, while Android is 75% of the global cellphone market - there's plenty of room for growth in hardware... if you stop looking at the marketing speak, whatever that means.

I don’t see how this really changes the underlying problem of the device pays on you and then they sell that information to the highest bidder? I’m not reaching for a financial report to fix that.

Apple doesn't sell information, they sell access to eyeballs. Quite a big difference. The whole point of first OPs point was that ad revenues to Apple are not worth hurting the other parts of their business built around privacy. Pointing out that Apple shows ads for owned services within their own OS isn't a case otherwise.

Apple absolutely does allow wholesale data harvesting by turning a blind eye to apps that straight up embed spyware SDKs.

This isn’t some hypothetical or abstract scenario, it’s a real life multi billion dollar a year industry that Apple allows on their devices.

You can argue that this is not the same thing as the native ad platform that they run and I’d agree but it’s also a distinction without a meaningful difference.

All you've done is move the goal posts, and it's not even ads related. I'm not entirely certain what you're arguing, other than having some feelings about Apple.

Good luck getting widevine decryption to work without a locked down OS...

It’s worked on Linux for a while, though it is limited to 720p I believe.

Why would torrents use widevine?

Like another comment mentioned I'm ready to go back to torrenting. Im currently paying for 4 streaming service subscriptions (if you count YouTube premium) where I have super segmented and annoying search UX, and Apple won't even let me pay for their service in my EU county (Croatia). And the DRM story is ridiculous. I'll just setup ARR stack and have a better experience than I can pay for - for free.

I'll still keep buying stuff on steam.

Imagine wasting CPU time with that, instead of watching a mkv file with mpv.

Why would anyone pay to be treated like shit.

Convenience. Always comes back to convenience.

Jellyfin + Arr stack would take a couple of hours to setup and cost $10/month for a seedbox in Europe, but it's not as convenient as downloading an app and logging in.

If it was just one app or even two I would agree but there's : - Netflix - HBO max - Sky Showtime - Amazon Prime - Apple TV+ - Disney+

This is just the stuff I watched this year.

Add in all the region locks, also not all the services having rights to local dubs despite them being available (more for children's stuff but still relevant, Disney+ is unusable for me because of this)

Netflix used to have a catalog worth keeping the subscription on, nowadays I maybe get to watch something once a quarter and keep it on for kids stuff.

Streaming is not convince anymore it's a shitshow.

I think a jellyfin/ARR/Seedbox setup is going to be the solution this year.

True. The best option currently is to buy an Nvidia Shield TV, unlock the bootloader and install a custom Android ROM. The hardware is great, and if you install a custom ROM, you have more freedom than Apple TV will ever give you.

> I don't pretend that Apple is saintly, but their profit model is currently to make money through premium prices on premium products

Is this statement based on anything other than Apple marketing materials, perhaps a meaningful qualification from an independent third party? I worry this falsehood is being repeated so much it has become "truth".

Repeating "this falsehood" doesn't make it a falsehood either.

Nothing is false about asking to prove a unicorn exists.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but it certainly rhymes. Is there proof that Apple is monetizing our data with third parties? It's very clear how almost every other major company is, but Apple's been reasonably respectful about it.

They’re certainly monetizing your data with first parties

Google is also vehemently opposed to selling your data to third parties. That's how they keep themselves as the middleman between advertisers and users. What they do is allow detailed behavioral targeting. Apple prefers to expose contextual targeting data to advertising instead. Apple is also better about not letting advertisers run random scripts.

But frankly the difference between the two companies seems more a matter of degree than kind. It's not like Apple has a strong, principled stance against collecting data. They have a strong principled stance against other ad networks collecting user data, which looks a lot like anticompetitiveness. Their first party software collects identifiable data on you regardless of whether you opt out. They just avoid using that to target you if you opt out.

The reason Apple says their advertising doesn't track you is because they define "tracking" as purchasing third party data, not first party data collection.

> Is there proof that Apple is monetizing our data with third parties?

Other than a history replete of cooperation with domestic and foreign state surveillance, which in exchange allow its market position, you mean?

For some reason, some people have this inexplicable rose-tinted vision of Apple. Until they release the source code of their products, the only rational stance is to treat their software as malware.

If further evidence is necessary, any Apple device that I have owned pings multiple Apple domains several times per minute, despite disabling every cloud dependency that can be disabled. The roles of the domains are partially documented, but traffic is encrypted and it is impossible to know for sure what information Apple is exfiltrating. It is certainly a lot more than a periodic software update check. It certainly seems that Apple is documenting how people interact with the devices they own very closely. That's an insane amount of oversight over people's lives considering that some (most?) people use their phones as their primary computer.

I just opened Activity Monitor - a process called "dasd" is the 5th largest consumer of CPU time. What does it do? Apple does not want you to know. Apple also will not let you disable it. Apple will not even tell you if this process is legitimate (it is signed by "Software Signing" lmao).

    $ man dasd
    No manual entry for dasd

There are like two dozen processes like this, half of which open network connections despite me never invoking any Apple services or even built-in apps. macOS has basically become malware.

It schedules low-priority background processes.

https://eclecticlight.co/2023/01/23/scheduled-activities-1-s...

Until we see the source code (or at least a man page) that is an unverified claim and the process should be treated like malware:

    while : ; do pkill -9 dasd ; sleep 10 ; done

The tasks it "schedules" must be very low-priority, because nothing breaks when dasd doesn't run.

That's...what background processes do? They're supposed to run occasionally and be resilient to disruption.

But if you wanna be afraid of boring ordinary things, you go right ahead.

Even excusing that daemon, here is a list of processes which have attempted to contact Apple in the past 24 hours, according to Little Snitch. I am certain this is not even a complete list, because macOS is closed source and likely can bypass application firewalls altogether:

    akd -> gsa.apple.com
    nsurlsessiond -> gateway.icloud.com
    nsurlsessiond -> mesu.apple.com
    nsurlsessiond -> gdmf-ados.apple.com
    nsurlsessiond -> gdmf.apple.com
    adprivacyd -> bag.itunes.apple.com
    CloudTelemetryService -> gateway.icloud.com
    cloudd -> gateway.icloud.com
    amsondevicestoraged -> bag.itunes.apple.com
    tipsd -> ipcdn.apple.com
    parsec-fbf -> fbs.smoot.apple.com
    parsec-fbf -> swallow.apple.com
    com.apple.geod -> gspe1-ssl.ls.apple.com
    identityservicesd -> init.ess.apple.com

Again, I have never used iCloud/Apple services, turned off all available telemetry options and did not open any Apple applications while all this took place (I only use Firefox and iTerm). Almost all of these processes lack a man page, or if they have one, it's one-line nonsense which explains nothing. This is beyond unprofessional.

The scheduling shouldn't be the 5th largest consumer of CPU. The question is what is it scheduling. Collecting data about user behavior would be a background task, you know..

What falsehood? That apple's profit mix is much less advertising than its competitors is just a fact about their incentives in the moment. He didn't really go all that far in claiming anything beyond that being better than the alternative of being mostly an advertising company.

its a proprietary black box with a billion dollar marketing budget like all apple devices

It's based on their balance of ad vs produce revenue thus far.

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