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Comment by boringg | Hacker News Reader

Wait what are the signs that the new Apple CEO commitment is headed for the heap? Seriously asking

Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices. This is explicitly the opposite of Apple’s philosophy until recently and Schiller is stepping back reputedly due to his opposition to this approach.

The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.

That is too bad - how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity? I hope he doesn't start trying to monetize privacy.

> how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity?

Convince shareholders that it's been leaving money on the table.

> how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity?

Poor decision making exists everywhere. Size of a company is absolutely no insurance against it. See Tesla for a specific example.

This happens in majority of companies.. visionaries and thought leaders leave, eventually a layer of bean counters and middle managers replace them.

Everything is then run by excel people with metrics. Innovation dies, product suffers and company spirals downward.

where do you get info that Ternus is about increasing number of ads? i've missed that evidently, I was at Apple engineering for several years, so for Cue i believe it just from observation, but no sense of such for Ternus.

> Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices

There’s zero indication Ternus is onboard with that - Cue yes, but Ternus was not CEO when any of the stuff that is happening now was being developed

He was part of the management team and they know each others’ views. Schiller’s stepping back was a clear signal to me.

To be a bit critical, haven’t Apple software and hardware quality been getting worse for years even before the new CEO?

Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.

Hardware has been improving a lot since the low point of butterfly keyboards and no ports. Jony Ive went out the door and things improved. Then on the software side they course corrected recently after Alan Dye left. I have hope the software improvements will start to accellerate.

The ads show they are out of ideas and with everything enshitifying, and a duopoly, they don't need to serve customers. just be slightly less shitty than google.

This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.

We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5

Honestly I don't think lack of new ideas is the problem, it's the bad execution/design of their existing products. Like look at Time Machine on macOS. The basic idea (backups) is almost not an idea at all, but the first implementation was amazing for its time, and the current implementation is a total mess and basically unusable. The idea is not the issue.

Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.

Good examples.

When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)

Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.

Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.

I normally can't start apps from spotlight. It literally has forgotten that the applications folder exists, so I have to open it up in finder and scroll to the app to start it.

I think the hardware has improved a lot over the past decade, not always in visible ways. I think this is true even if you disregard the replacement of the butterfly keyboard.

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