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Comment by rapind | Hacker News Reader

Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.

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> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.

At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].

[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...

Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?

Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?

¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…

The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.

Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.

> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt

Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.

Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?

If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?

It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.

Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.

I've never understood this.

You can get shirts tailored (bespoke, not MTM!) for well under $100 in Istanbul, around $150 in Hongkong, and about $200 in Mexico City.

So why pay to be a walking advertisement for some European brand conglomerate?

Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.

The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.

> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.

it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?

if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?

It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.

That applies to businesses with small moats.

Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.

> thermocline of trust

Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.

Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.

I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).

Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…

Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.

> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.

It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.

The real question is why is the median Apple decision maker circa 2026 vastly more short term greedy than the median Apple decision maker circa 2012?

While I don't know, my suspicion is that the market is saturated, but the company is still hungry for "numbers go up".

"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.

It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?

I think it's not just Apple. Everyone and every company seem to become greedier and greedier. Economically, the world is not in a great place, apart from a minority which just gets richer and richer.

I think some of it just that different people have different priorities. Some of what protected Apple was vanity. I think Steven Jobs cared about how people saw him and his products. He wanted to be the guy who made a premium product that he thought was cool and was proud of. The longer time went on, the less Apple execs cared about what he would have wanted and started caring more about what they wanted.

I also think that they're counting on people to have been conditioned to accept ads everywhere. Microsoft has been infesting their OS with ads for over a decade which, like it or not, has normalized that practice.

Apple is counting on the fact that iphone users aren't going to switch to android devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users; it's only going to get worse.

I think the Apple Effect was largely a result of personal narcissism.

Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.

The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.

Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.

The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.

The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.

What happened to Apple University, or whatever they called Job’s attempt to document their key to success?

Some MBA poisoned it?

Steven Jobs definitely cared about the polish as a reflection of himself. He wanted people to associate the name Steven Jobs with apple. When people thought of apple they thought of Steven Jobs. He didn't want to put the name of his company on anything unpolished or tasteless because people would associate that with Steven Jobs, since everyone knew Steven Jobs had the final say.

No more Jobs being tastemaker at the helm. Cook is pure business.

Everyone is slowly moving the line. Cant move to far ahead, cant stay to far behind.

The more we can isolate consumers the less they will care about others and the less of a point complaining.

I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.

But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"

apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.

Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.

There exists a good answer to that question but they apparently dont know it.

> lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO

You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.

Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?

> they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?

Yup. If the main differentiator is gone, you move to the next marginal thing that matters, which in this case is working as a map.

Yes it is for me. Google Maps has much better and more up to date information.

A number of times I’ve been set to the wrong place by Apple Maps.

If you’re going to be served ads either way you might as well pick the more reliable tool.

For maps Apple has a lower quality product, that lets me down when I really need it, and has no privacy advantage.

They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (for the Kindle it was $20 one-time).

For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.

Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?

I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.

I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.

I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.

I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.

> I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.

This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.

>I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.

It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension

That doesn't help you if you use the YouTube app on your phone, which I'm guessing is what a huge fraction of the viewership does.

But you can just use the browser with an adblocker for Youtube on the phone, which also allows you to play audio in the background for free e.g. for playing music, what's the point in using the app at all?

I'm speculating about what most mobile YouTube viewers actually do, not what makes the most sense.

> seat heater subscription services going for BMW?

Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.

> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (

It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"

> t's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you.

Worth noting that this is what most of the live service gaming industry is doing.

> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.

You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.

No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.

We need an open phone platform badly.

>which is even more bloated and ad infested.

Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.

Even better, Morphe can rip ads out of the native YouTube client :).

Where would the luxury market go? Asking for a friend

In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.

GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.

Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.

[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...

https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...

Pantone and some sound partnership.

Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.

Likewise, no Android Auto

There is Android Auto. There's contactless payments in Europe through Curve, Paypal, and some specific banks. Some companies are working on bringing them to the US.

Funny enough, the only part of Apple Pay I use with any frequency is the browser/app integration part, basically as a much more convenient alternative to PayPal sometimes.

IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.

No android auto? What are you basing this on? I ask because I am responding from grapheneos while connected to android auto, and I am concerned I am in the wrong universe again.

I guess I shouldn't believe what I read. I and when certainly wouldn't buy phone that doesn't do Android auto... Glad to hear it works!

It does. You do have to install it (GrapheneOS provides a Play Store Sandbox to install google apps to) intentionally, it is not installed by default. Perhaps that tripped up the author of the misinformation you came across?

In any case, it is a fantastic OS with many of the annoyances of Android removed. (Scoped file permissions are fantastic, for example) If you are on the fence, I'd suggest giving it a shot. Replacing a phone OS might seem scary, but it is really pretty similar to use.

> Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment

Cash is much better for privacy. The government, banking system, and countless intermediaries should not know how I spend my money.

So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance.

I agree about cash, but we are talking about a luxury experience. In fact, GrapheneOS has talked about it [1].

> So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance

I doubt you're implying this, but GrapheneOS doesn't break contactless, Google does by blocking GrapheneOS. Contactless works with curve and paypal in Europe.

[1] https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117249893761790371

"Moving from cash to credit cards, PayPal, etc. is an ongoing privacy disaster."

From what I've seen of GrapheneOS, it's not a luxury product, it's a product for tinkerers, who don't mind finicky granular configs. If I'm paying a premium, I expect sensible, privacy respecting, defaults that I can use out of the box. Not constant fumbles until everything is "setup".

I don't think there's any defaults you need to change out of the box besides installing the apps you want.

But yeah, besides the stock Android which looks good, GrapheneOS does not add UI features themselves. When they add features like the recent secure clipboard, it fits nicely in the settings.

I think you have a wrong idea about GrapheneOS. You install the sandboxed Play Store/Services through their app store and then it's pretty much the same as any other Android phone. Except that it doesn't get in your face with preinstalled crap (Google, Apple, or Samsung). On the GrapheneOS forums there are a lot of non-technical people that install GrapheneOS and don't have many issues. The primary annoyance is Google's abuse of their monopoly with Play Integrity.

I would say it often feels more like a luxury product than an iPhone or Google-certified Android phone because it's not full of cheesy stuff. It's what iPhone and Pixel would look like if Apple/Google didn't want to push you: subscriptions, AI, movie/music apps, etc.

As someone who has daily driven both side by side as much as I love GOS, AOSP / Android absolutely does not feel premium compared to iOS. Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS. And the FOSS apps on Android are extremely subpar in terms of feel compared to iOS (off the top of my head look at how bad the Fossify Contacts app is compared to Google Contacts) but that’s the trade-off.

I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.

> I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.

"There's a high chance." https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117299954135808210

In other posts they've said they will be sold with GrapheneOS out of the box.

Oh damn nice. Guess we’ll also see later today too since the Signature should be revealed at the snapdragon summit

We did not see. Unfortunately.

iOS? "Polish"?

Even AOSP is head-and-shoulders better than iOS.

It is subjective, to me AOSP just feels extremely rough and undercooked in a lot of places

Try disabling animations in AOSP and see how it feels. You won't be able to go to the painfully slow iOS afterwards.

Seriously - first thing I do in any Android device in developer options

You don't even need developer settings for that, there's an official option in the accessibility settings.

When I see "polish" they're usually referring to the opposite of things like this. They seem to like sluggish UI as long as it's "smooth" (not "fast") and has flashy animations.

Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS.

Sorry, but no.

I also have an iPhone for $REASONS. Both my prior iPhone Air and my new iPhone 18 Pro still frequently stutters. Even scrolling some settings screens (which are very simple), I can often see frames getting dropped. Apple apps like the App Store are one huge frame-dropfest (even if you let it preload all assets). Apple can't get a nearly 1500 Euro phone with the fastest single-core performance and probably the fastest GPU to render normal window chrome smoothly anymore.

My P10P with GrapheneOS, which only has a midrange SoC by modern standards (don't believe what Google tells you) and it is buttery smooth.

iOS got even more terrible with Liquid Glass, so many things are badly readable, even with the slider set to completely opaque in iOS 27.

iOS used to be premium compared to Android. But Apple enshittified iOS over the last few years. Even most Apple pundits agree.

Since people seem to disagree because they simply cannot see it, here are two recordings at 0.5x speed so that even people who are not sensitive to stutters can see it:

https://drive.proton.me/urls/S24N1S17XG#56iNGffWKqZr

https://drive.proton.me/urls/DH527V6GRR#625BpPuAcYPb

You mean like when I clicked this article? What an ad filled mess of a website.

At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.

Where would they go? Android? That's even more spammy and ad ridden. They sure aren't installing grapheneOS.

> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place

> On the flip side

Pun intended?

Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!

Don't give 'em more ideas! :)

Is BMW still doing the $20/mo for heated seats or whatever? All these companies man… not everything needs to be recurring revenue ffs.

That one gets a worse rep than I think it deserves.

You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.

It is already built into the damn car. Everyone already paid for it.

It's bad because you already paid for the hardware, any additional charge is just a money grab.

Soon enough they'll be asking you to pay for Storage Space Pro (lets you open the trunk) and Intelligent Manual Media Control (lets you slightly lower the volume of ads that automatically blast out of all the speakers when the car is on)

Really? You think a luxury brand charging a subscription for heated seats, a basic add on, is inline (haha rip inline 6).

A one time fee to use something you’ve already payed for?

They’ve really MBA’d the crap out of that brand and it serves them right now it’s going down the tube.

> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?

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