Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem. Everything from their ads to things like this are just in really poor taste, and aren’t something that they would have done 15 years ago because they would have thought it was beneath their brand.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card.
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
drob518 · 28m ago
Yep. And this is why “liquid glass” is the hot new thing this year. That’s basically all we have left to drive the refresh cycle that tech is addicted to.
Workaccount2 · 27m ago
Probably more hardware while trying to recreate the "your friends and family will leave you out" effect of iMessage.
iwontberude · 6m ago
2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.
sillyfluke · 24m ago
>I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for
What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
gizajob · 53m ago
Nokia.
ericmay · 13m ago
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.
Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
transcriptase · 6m ago
An iPhone 11 does indeed do all of those things easily. The only thing it lacks is LiDAR, which I would argue very few people use intentionally and was introduced the following year anyway. Camera of course not going to be equivalent, but still takes stunning photos.
rocketvole · 4m ago
I have an iPhone 8. It does literally everything you've listed, and the battery is cheap/easy to replace. My lg v30, with a battery replacement is about the same (albiet with a custom os since androids didn't get many years of updates back then)
xyzzyz · 7m ago
I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design, and for everything else, a 6 year old iPhone can most definitely do all of that. I know, because I did all of these things on an iPhone 11 up until earlier this year, and I only replaced it because the charging port was damaged.
cardamomo · 6m ago
I didn't think it matters if they are an average smartphone user. They are still representative of a person of smartphone users.
simonklitj · 6m ago
My almost 5 year old iPhone 12 does all of this. No issues, no pull towards upgrading except for USB-C.
ryandrake · 3h ago
The whole forcing a U2 album onto people’s devices thing, which happened shortly after Jobs died, was the first time I, a former Apple fan, sat up and realized “wow, these guys are really losing their taste/tact!” Weird to think that was over a decade ago!
iambateman · 28m ago
I think Jobs makes the same mistake with U2 even if he is at the helm. But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
Apple had enjoyed having world-leading crisis communications embodied within Steve and didn’t immediately know what to do when he was gone.
andyferris · 35m ago
I agree that was weird - but it was never forced onto your device unless you chose to download that album (it would be like saying a particular album was "forced" onto your spotify when they are ALL available and free - this was just the first "spotify"-style album designed to be streamed not purchased).
yunwal · 30m ago
It was automatically added to your library, so if you shuffle your recently added or your whole library it got included.
iinnPP · 20m ago
Wow. Depending on the timing, that's a brand ending event for me. Though I am definitely not the norm.
jwr · 3h ago
Jobs was no angel, but he did follow "build great things and profits will come" philosophy. Apple these days is run for profit: profits are clearly first, and good things might accidentally come as well as a side effect.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
renegade-otter · 6m ago
You mean the old classic way of doing business where the company focuses on the product and the customer and not the shareholder? What a shocking and novel idea.
jama211 · 2h ago
They did loads of tacky things back in the day, we’ve just forgotten about them.
troupo · 2h ago
Modern Apple can't even do tacky things.
Tacky things under Jobs were failed experiments. Modern Apple doesn't believe in either experiments or failed experiments.
mcphage · 2m ago
> Modern Apple doesn't believe in either experiments
Apple Vision Pro qualifies here.
moomoo11 · 1h ago
I think back then their stock was so bad that anything to make it go up was a good thing.
Now Apple is a multi trillion dollar company and they can’t take as much risk.
layer8 · 1h ago
Given the Vision Pro, and the many billions spent on the now-defunct car project, I’m not so sure this is true.
croes · 2h ago
You‘re holding it wrong
aspenmayer · 1h ago
I had a 3rd party band-aid sticker on the iPhone 4 I waited in line to buy at the flagship Apple Store in San Francisco. I remember Square handing out aux-input cardreaders for free to me and other line-con attendees pre-purchase. This was jailbreakme times. Cydia pre-exists the Apple App Store on iOS, in case anyone was unaware. Cydia and the wider jb scene used to keep Apple honeset, as Cydia is the original App Store. How the mighty have fallen.
jmsdnns · 3h ago
Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
he was vocal about his opposition to intrusive ads in particular. he'd say "You’re either the customer or you’re the product." he believed users paid a premium for apple products and that they should not be subjected to compromises with advertising.
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
chii · 3h ago
Cook is an operations person. He makes the logistics work. He's no visionary. Jobs is a visionary, but is not a logistics person. Apple struck lightning when both existed, to provide complimentary ideas and counterbalances.
Lighting doesnt strike twice imho.
mattmaroon · 3h ago
Tell that to Van Halen!
hshshshshsh · 3h ago
Yeah. One thing I learned working at a Big company is that companies are full of parasites who are there to get their promotion or salary increase and don't give a cat shit about users or mission or values. Honestly it sucked any joy out of my life but I am stuck here because of visa.
noisy_boy · 15m ago
Until a company fully supports the combination of top-class engineering + top-class user experience to the exclusion and expulsion of political parasites, this is inevitable. Unfortunately, the ever-expanding blind profit chasing, at the exclusion of everything else, kills the chance of that happening.
soderfoo · 29m ago
Visionaries and solution oriented devs can’t deliver the kind of quarterly “profitability” that careerist, KPI-chasing, promotion-hungry product managers love to promise.
breckenedge · 59m ago
Happens at small companies too, especially those owned by private equity.
bombcar · 1h ago
You almost need (not going to be definitive because some big companies just need to execute the same operations for hundreds of years) a Jobs or Gates or someone who doesn't believe their own bullshit and is willing to say "this sucks, we're shitcanning it."
Otherwise you get generic slop, eventually.
librasteve · 22m ago
Tim Cook needs to get a grip on this. If Apple loses the privacy advocate reputation, then they will lose a lot of customers.
ttcbj · 32m ago
I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.
AdamN · 1h ago
I remember when Jobs killed the Herald Square Apple Store even though the lease had been signed and it 'made sense' on paper. When visiting the location it's clear it's a dump and no Apple store will fix that. He put his brand before short term revenue.
hcarvalhoalves · 42m ago
Company takeover by bean counters and clowns. It happens with every company, sooner or later.
Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.
necovek · 1h ago
Until it shows up in the bottom line, they will have all the metrics and data they need to continue pushing this way.
The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.
dubcanada · 3h ago
Jobs has been gone for almost 15 years. From what I know Ive had nothing to do with anything but design aesthetic.
I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…
bobbylarrybobby · 3h ago
The point is, when Jobs was around, there was an overarching (unstated?) policy at Apple of “nobody do anything to make us look like cheap tasteless shits”. Whereas now, Tim Cook is very happy to sell out for a quick buck. He's a logistics guy, not a product guy, and at his core is a bean counter; he neither has taste nor appreciates that it has value unto itself.
tokioyoyo · 3h ago
There were ~60M iPhone users when Jobs was the CEO. There are about ~1.4B right now. Both respectively accomplished very respectable things. It’s not selling for a quick buck if he was able to scale the business to such degrees. That being said, I agree that Apple makes a lot of wrongs.
ZenoArrow · 3h ago
> There are about ~1.4B right now.
What are you basing this on, the total number of iPhones sold since 2007? If so, it doesn't account for the users that have bought multiple iPhones.
jama211 · 2h ago
One google shows that’s considered the “current active user” count, not total sales. 2.3 billion by Jan 2024 (so more now) is the estimate for total sales.
tokioyoyo · 2h ago
I did quick Googling, and it sounded about right. Roughly 50% USA, 20% China, 50% Japan, 30% Europe, 3% India already is a big number.
lodovic · 1h ago
I used a llm to sum your percentages and counted only 785,644,479 people. That's just over half the 1.4B claim.
However, it also linked to articles that showed that as of 2025, there are approximately 1.38 to 1.56 billion active iPhone users worldwide. So the percentages may be misleading but the number is correct.
trinix912 · 3h ago
Part of the appeal of Apple was that not everyone and their mom just had an Apple device. They heavily played on that, similar to how fashion does. That "exclusivity" (sort of) is gone now, and it shows with Apple trying to create likable, noncontroversial designs for the larger crowd. They try to make up for it with prices, but it misses the point.
danaris · 56m ago
Maybe that was part of the appeal to you.
To most of us, the appeal of Apple has always been primarily that it does what it does well.
I don't think Apple themselves thinks their appeal depends on exclusivity, but rather on a premium experience.
moomoo11 · 1h ago
Apple became Gucci
keiferski · 3h ago
The entire reason Apple made devices that were a level above competitors is because the design wasn’t just the aesthetic. Ive was chief designer and so obviously had a key impact.
nottorp · 1h ago
Key impact like the shit emoji keyboard that couldn't survive a single speck of dust?
hshshshshsh · 2h ago
How do you know Ive had a key impact? Do you know it or read somewhere online?
dijit · 2h ago
“How do you know that <primary responsible person> had impact”.
Do you hear yourself?
hshshshshsh · 2h ago
Then all OP is saying key impact person had key impact. Doesn't add any substance to discussion.
dijit · 2h ago
> How do you know that? Because of the title?
Yes
tempaccount420 · 19m ago
3x Boosted?
exe34 · 1h ago
Neither did your second sentence, and you still wrote it. Sometimes we write things down to draw attention to the fact, not to inform a naive audience of facts that they did not know.
> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
aqme28 · 1h ago
Interesting. I feel like this clause is violated very often by major apps:
> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.
discostrings · 12m ago
Uber violates this. At least as of a few years ago, there was no way to get notifications about driver arrival without also getting special offer and Uber Eats spam notifications periodically.
I denied them the ability to send any notifications on principle, so now it's very annoying to have to check the app to see the status, it makes things worse for both me and them, and I use it less as a result.
kccqzy · 33m ago
As soon as I see one violation, I turn off the notification permission altogether. For example the Amazon shopping app can't send me notifications.
sethops1 · 5m ago
I'm at the point where literally only the messages, clock, and maps apps can send me notifications.
foooorsyth · 1h ago
I’ve said several times before that notifications should be reportable as spam directly to Google/Apple, just like email spam reporting.
Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
remus · 1h ago
> Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
Revolut are really annoying for this. I'm sure there's a few spare days In their development cycle for someone to implement it if they wanted to, but instead they keep everything on the same channel which is 50% promo shit, because you don't want to miss that notification warning you about fraudulent activity on your card.
righthand · 4m ago
> The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private.
Well at least it’s acknowledged Apple privacy is only perception and not actually secure or private.
ksec · 3h ago
The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet. It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads, talk about privacy as fundamental human rights, and then have targeted Ads, in a place / software / services where no body expected it to appear. And not everybody has the Ad, so by HN / Reddit / Internet definition that Ad is targeted.
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
gyomu · 1h ago
> Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.
2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?
bix6 · 31m ago
I didn’t have a proper guess for 1 but I was correct on 2. The answer to 1 is rather disappointing.
To keep the guessing game going: what percent of Apple is owned by institutional investors?
hosteur · 2h ago
> The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet.
Yes it is
latexr · 3h ago
> It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads
What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.
What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.
ksec · 2h ago
The App Store Search and iCloud Ads are relatively recent thing. The focus on tracking and invasion of privacy is also a refined version of it. Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads. ( And it was more targeting Facebook Ads without saying it. Which Apple plan to destroy ) Somewhere between 2019 - 2022 They literally have to come out and said to say they are not against ads but only against tracking because the whole Ad industry was furious so they have calm things down.
Here is another angle. If Apple could successfully destroy the In App Ads industry, which they earn nothing from, and force those value into subscription, who will benefit most? Remember Apple tried iAds and earn a percentage of it but failed.
People should at least read PG's Submarine [1] to understand how modern PR and media works. Once you have that understanding the lens of reading anything about Apple becomes a little different.
I think you've got your timeline mixed up. App Store search ads debuted in 2016, prior to your entire narrative.
encom · 2h ago
Apple is absolutely fine with tracking and privacy invasion, as long as they're the ones doing it.
danaris · 52m ago
Ads and privacy are not fundamentally opposed.
The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.
From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.
(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)
croes · 2h ago
They attack ads they are not getting paid for.
briandw · 10m ago
The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users. We paid for a product that tried its best to sweat the details and deliver the best experience possible. UX was king. Apple made hard choices and delivered minimal, thoughtful and delightful products. The motto was "less but better".
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
andrewinardeer · 4h ago
I'm sure at some marketing meeting at Google, a VP racing for pole posiiton has wanted to green-light the idea of putting advertisements in their Wallet app.
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
avhception · 3h ago
While Google may or may not refrain from putting ads in their wallet app due to this incident, the aggressive ways that they use to get me to use the wallet app have been off putting enough.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
aucisson_masque · 2h ago
I love these choices, yes or yes later.
They do the same on my windows computer, ever time I open edge and every time I open a new tab !
This is the kind of behavior I wouldn’t even tolerate in real life, they are really taking us for sheeps.
loloquwowndueo · 1h ago
Using windows and tolerating it’s crap is a choice, my dude. Linux and MacOS are right there.
lozenge · 2h ago
Have you tried going to "App Info" and "Disable" for Wallet?
ryandrake · 2h ago
To be fair, the “Yes, Maybe Later” pattern can be seen throughout Silicon Valley. Tech companies, by and large, cannot accept “No” from users.
netsharc · 2h ago
What I learned about consent I learned from megacorps...
Google was there first. During Euro 2024, the "transaction successful" screen displayed some football-related animation.
TheDong · 4h ago
Was it an ad or an easter egg, like the "google.com" logo animations you get on new years and other holidays?
Did it send a push notification or bother the user? Got a screenshot or reference, since a quick google doesn't uncover it?
Neil44 · 3h ago
Yeah it was an Easter egg style thing, similar to when the change the Google logo for special occasions. Not comparable to a push add for a movie (which I also haven't seen a screenshot of yet to be fair)
TheDong · 2h ago
> which I also haven't seen a screenshot of yet to be fair
It was shown full screen after completing payment, as a distraction, and increasing the time for which Google Wallet takes over your screen during payments.
theginger · 4h ago
They have been doing that for years for all sorts of things usually seasonal but sometimes other stuff
nyc_pizzadev · 1h ago
I got this ad, and ya, I was truly bewildered to get such an ad and then shocked that it came from my Wallet. I then spent the next hour searching how to disable this new marketing stream and it looks like nothing can be done. Anyway, glad to see I’m not alone here.
Zufriedenheit · 2h ago
I am probably not the average computer user. I didn’t even receive this notification, but just reading about this makes me reconsider switching my devices from Apple to open source software. I have every possible ad blocked and I have been a happy user of Apple devices so far. But this behavior feels so scammy and cheap, not worthy of a premium brand.
jb1991 · 5h ago
Did they learn nothing from giving everyone a free U2 album that nobody wanted, and the backlash from that?
JimDabell · 4h ago
I think this is a lot worse than the U2 thing. Operating systems bundle free stuff all the time. Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
lycopodiopsida · 2h ago
This damn U2 album still appears in my smart playlists in Apple Music from time to time - it is insane that I can’t delete it completely so many years later.
lozenge · 2h ago
Apparently they removed the removal tool in 2018, you now have to contact Apple Support to get it removed.
JimDabell · 2h ago
> you now have to contact Apple Support to get it removed.
I just checked, and I can delete it from my library the same way I can delete any other album.
loloquwowndueo · 1h ago
Thanks for the tip! I’d given up on deleting this crap. Glad to see it works now, good riddance!
daqnz · 3h ago
Completely disagree, for many people it was the only track in iTunes. And when things triggered iTunes to play it played that.
I was in an older man’s car last year. It started playing the album. He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.
A decade later that album is still annoying people. Bluetooth triggered play or something like that and the only music on the old iPhone started playing.
ryandrake · 2h ago
I’ve met so many people who only have that one album on their devices, and it plays every time they plug into their car or connect via Bluetooth. And they are all just annoyed/accepting of it. My wife was one of them. And what made it worse was you couldn’t just pause it: with her car’s particular head unit, anything you touched (like the volume control) would cause the head unit to issue another “play music” command to restart it. Eventually enough was enough and I figured out how to remove the album for good.
earthtograndma · 1h ago
If I'm reading all this correctly, it sounds like Apple has a system that will automatically play unintended music at various times from the music library. The only way to prevent this is to completely wipe out the entire library.
And the chief complaint is that there is an album in the library.
netruk44 · 16m ago
You can also uninstall the Music app to stop it from playing. Theoretically.
In practice, actually deleting the Music app on iPhone causes the phone to be unable to connect to cars at all. Without Music installed, you can't even use (e.g.) Spotify in your car.
(Or, at least, that's how it was. Perhaps they've fixed this bug in the 5 or so years since I've tried)
makeitdouble · 31m ago
Both are annoying as hell, but people found a workaround, and that album screws it again.
But yes, it's still the insult on top of the injury.
fwip · 25m ago
If I'm reading correctly, the bug is in the car's audio control system.
jmathai · 52m ago
Because the presence of that album is what creates this bug and the user never purchased or downloaded it themself.
I have this same problem but it plays my wedding playlist from nearly 20 years ago. Some terribly annoying song I no longer like. I assume it’s too much work to delete my library and so I just deal with the annoyance.
jama211 · 2h ago
If it annoyed them that much they’d have rung apple support and gotten it removed. I agree it’s bad and they shouldn’t have done it, but after a decade you have to accept some personal responsibility for it, if I bought a shoe and a rock was inside from factory and my foot hurt for 10 years at some point some of your current suffering is your own fault for not removing it lol
acomjean · 38m ago
My partners young niece dislikes U2 and apple for that move. She said a lot of her friend are the same. It was a bad move. They should have just made the album free and not pushed it to every device.
Apple did give away free videos on the old Mac OS install cds like widows did. I think to show off quick time and that your computer can play videos (back when that was newish). They didn’t install onto you hard drive..
x62Bh7948f · 5h ago
It was such a long time ago that the people who made the mistake have already retired, maybe.
msh · 4h ago
Most of the top management from that time is the same people today.
abcd_f · 4h ago
U2 stunt was Jobs' idea. He was a life-long fan of them.
Didn’t the U2 stunt happen three years after Steve Jobs died?
memset · 42m ago
I got this ad too.
I increasingly use wallet for everything - multiple credit cards, show tickets, transit tickets.
Is there an alternative? Android?
bfrog · 48m ago
I have a fundamental fear that Apple will lose itself the day it chases profits with Ads.
If I wanted Ad spam I would've used Google.
KingOfCoders · 2h ago
As I've said for the last ten years about Apple and ads, as soon as the momentum slows down, they will put ads everywhere and sell your data next if it keeps revenue growth up.
codedokode · 2h ago
Chinese phones show ad in notifications, obviously Americans see it, get jealous (what a difficult spelling!) and want to do the same.
kccqzy · 26m ago
Chinese phones are way more aggressive in showing ads. They have graduated to showing ads via the Live Activities feature, or push notifications with the Time Sensitive bit on to bypass Do Not Disturb.
There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s
throwanem · 2h ago
This year for the first time I started carrying an Android along with my iPhone. I've had Apple phones exclusively since I got my first smartphone in 2012, and before now never had a wandering eye. But the moves Apple has made lately make me realize it is time to make sure I'll have a ripcord to pull if I need one.
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
bambax · 4h ago
> That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?
drysart · 4h ago
Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising. Companies ultimately serve whoever they make their money from; and none of the other big tech players have a comprehensive business model where the end user is the customer instead of the product.
And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.
The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
JimDabell · 3h ago
> And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
I just want to highlight this because Hacker News can be incredibly dismissive about this.
Apple’s focus on privacy is a competitive advantage. Consumers value it, and Apple’s competitors have business models that undermine it.
Even if you think Tim Cook is the literal devil and Apple will do absolutely anything for a buck, Apple’s focus on privacy is still relevant.
Privacy is valuable to Apple. It’s a wedge they can use against their competitors. Google doesn’t make their fortune selling hardware, they make it selling ads. Privacy is something that gets in the way of Google’s profits.
Because Apple are in this position, it’s profitable to them to champion privacy. It’s something they can do that’s valuable to customers that their competitors are at a disadvantage with.
You don’t have to be a fan of Apple, and you don’t have to trust Apple. All you have to do is believe they want to make money. Being pro-privacy is profitable to Apple, and so they act accordingly.
rpdillon · 1h ago
I disagree with you. I think the majority of Apple's promises are purely marketing. And this is a moment where the mask has slipped. Your account does not allow for the case where Apple can successfully convince their users that they are privacy-oriented while simultaneously not being privacy oriented.
A great example of this is that they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken. An actual privacy-centric product, this would be a major problem. Consider Signal.
Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
There is no giant moat between Apple and privacy violation. They'll do it whenever they feel like it, and Apple customers are very forgiving.
JimDabell · 1h ago
> they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken.
It’s not completely broken. For average users, erring on the side of being able to restore from backup is the best choice. For people who need more security, that’s what Advanced Data Protection is for. You have the choice of which option suits you best; I think the default is appropriate for typical users.
> Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
What happened was they put a huge amount of effort into building a system that goes as far as it possibly can to implement CSAM detection that could work on E2E encrypted photo libraries while maintaining as much privacy as possible.
The design of the feature demonstrates they put a lot of effort into privacy – competitors just scan everything that’s uploaded to them, while Apple went above and beyond to do something a lot more difficult. The entire point of it was to detect without Apple having to have access to your photo library. There’s no point to design a system like that if they weren’t prioritising privacy – they could just scan on the server like everybody else if privacy isn’t a priority.
And what happened – everybody freaked out anyway, so they cancelled the feature. It’s an example that supports my point. Apple respond to incentives.
Personally, I wish they hadn’t cancelled the feature. Virtually everybody complaining about it didn’t understand how it worked and thought it worked in a completely different way.
codedokode · 2h ago
So if Apple really cares about privacy, their products send less telemetry than my Linux system, correct?
JimDabell · 1h ago
> So if Apple really cares about privacy
This is a complete misunderstanding of what I was saying. I wasn’t arguing that Apple “really cares” about privacy; quite the opposite – I was arguing that it doesn’t matter if Apple “really cares”, what matters is that they are financially and strategically incentivised to be pro-privacy.
Linux is not Apple’s competitor. Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.
nottorp · 1h ago
> Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.
Yeah, that's the sad thing. And on mobile their only competitor is Google... so they don't have to be really good at privacy.
rpdillon · 1h ago
I agree with this point as well. I had the privilege of talking to a telemetry ingestion engineer at Apple, and I learned quite a bit about the amount of data they collect on their users. It's absolutely staggering.
holowoodman · 1h ago
sssshhh, don't disturb their reality distortion field!
Apple can do no wrong, and if they do wrong, either your expectations were flawed and unreasonable, or it might just have been the accidential hiccup of a single deranged soon-to-be-ex-employee.
Please ignore all the signs and portents that Apple is just another Microsoft or Google, only with a better marketing department and a quasi-religious following...
kasey_junk · 38m ago
The op wasn’t arguing that there was some moral difference between apple and google. They were arguing an incentive difference.
And there is one! If you don’t recognize that you yourself are subject to some sort of distortion field.
bambax · 3h ago
The incident we are discussing absolutely disproves this! Apple is happy to jeopardize privacy and the very idea of it, for a quick buck blasting an ad to all its users. They don't care one way or the other.
But the truth is, nobody really cares about privacy, least of all, users. Nobody ever bought an iPhone because of "privacy"; people buy iPhones because they work, and because they seem cool. Everyone's happy to hand over data to any service.
Facebook has three billion users.
kasey_junk · 37m ago
No, it proves that large organizations have competing priorities and that they can make bad decisions.
JimDabell · 3h ago
The reason why even the most die-hard Apple fans are up in arms about this is because it’s such a break from Apple’s normal standards. It’s the exception that proves the rule. This harms Apple more than it benefits them.
blibble · 43m ago
> Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising.
have you used the app store in the last few years?
I search for my bank and the first results are a load of scammy crypto app ads
then my actual bank app is at result number 3
this is the sort of behaviour I would have expected from Google
hibikir · 2h ago
The fact that they make money doing something doesn't stop hungry PMs and VPs from pushing other revenue sources.
Amazon used to sell us items, now ad sales are a big part of their storefront's revenue. Cable used to not have ads.
If you aren't paying, you are the product doesn't also imply that if you paying you are definitely not the product. To the modern exec, everything and everyone is the product. I an surprised that gig economy apps aren't also selling the eyeballs of their workers, making them watch ads to work.
matthewdgreen · 3h ago
Apple needs to show revenue growth every single year. Their hardware and services businesses will eventually tap out, and then they'll start mining their users for data and advertising. It's a miracle they've managed to avoid it for so long, but they will eventually be forced to. It will probably coincide with Tim Cook's retirement, unfortunately.
bambax · 3h ago
> lack of openness
Lack of openness means lack of privacy. If we can't install apps on the side that have proper adblock filtering, then all the promises in the world are hollow.
Veen · 3h ago
Lack of openness means a lack of privacy in theory, but in practice, openness often results in less privacy. The average user lacks the knowledge, time, and motivation to install and configure open systems to maximize privacy. They're likely to make mistakes that expose private data.
A closed system that prioritizes privacy will result in more users benefiting from greater privacy overall, even if it does give the platform more control than is ideal. And that's the issue with the wallet ads: Apple makes users more secure on average, but it depends on user trust, which it just betrayed.
Those who can take advantage of total control are a minority, and they are not really the people Apple cares about.
Xss3 · 1h ago
Such a false dichotomy that open automatically means insecure and leaky due to user error.
Sensible defaults and warnings about changing them is all you need to put any argument of 'bad for privacy' down.
holowoodman · 1h ago
A non-open system is not verifyable and therefore not trustable. Therefore a non-open system can never deliver privacy. At best it can attempt to trick you into believing it does.
charcircuit · 4h ago
Privacy and advertising are not mutually exclusive.
triska · 4h ago
Privacy is also about having control over your own space, both physically and digitally, and being free from unwanted intrusion or interference.
For me, such a notification is an unwanted intrusion, and it is not compatible with privacy.
pmontra · 3h ago
Advertising on old style TV, newspapers, billboards did not impact on privacy. Even non targeted advertising on the web can impact privacy because our browsers send requests to the ad servers and that's the beginning of fingerprinting, even with Javascript disabled.
trinix912 · 3h ago
The only way it would work on the web while fully preserving privacy would be if (1) ads were stored on the server of the website you're accessing or proxied by it, and (2) the website owner would never give the ad provider server logs. It can be done (and used to be).
Xss3 · 1h ago
When i first got into web hosting in the early noughties this is how i remember it being done. Want to advertise my game server on some site? Provide an image url and a link url. That was it.
tommoose · 3h ago
This is technically correct, but supporting examples are statistically insignificant.
Almondsetat · 4h ago
Privacy and targeted advertising are, which is the name of the game
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."
So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.
369548684892826 · 4h ago
That's true until it isn't, just like "Don't be evil" was for Google.
passwordoops · 4h ago
From industry analysis:
"Apple does have a traditional advertising business, and it does appear to be growing: The folks at Business Insider's sister company EMarketer think it will hit $6.3 billion this year, up from $5.4 billion last year.
And that's not nothing. For context: That's more than the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter generated in 2021, its last full year before Elon Musk bought the company; it's also more than the $4.6 billion Snap generated in 2023."
The article goes on to specify it's only 6% of Apple revenue. But 20% comes from Google and looking at how the antitrust trials are going, that source may soon dry up. The logical conclusion is Apple will aggressively move to make up for the loss by exploiting their captive audience.
I'm glad that people are mad about this. I got the ad, went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was. I was kind of surprised.
For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.
latexr · 3h ago
> went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was.
> Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
altairprime · 4h ago
Did we ever find out what happened at Mozilla that allowed that trust-destroying Mr. Robot advertisement to happen? There seems to be a trend (n=2) of Marketing spending consumer trust for one-time media engagement clicks.
detaro · 3h ago
Not in detail afaik. The impression I got was that they somehow just didn't consider that people not looking for it would notice, and per the statement at the time (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/retrospective-looking-gl...) the review process was too focused on privacy vs the big picture.
b0a04gl · 1h ago
because it's one of the only apps i've not disabled notifications for. you could've muted already tv+ ,mail ,stocks ,news ,fitness ,whatever. but not wallet cuz you leave that on for flights ,covid passes ,payments ,and some legit actions.
sails · 3h ago
They are also marketing “nearby” coffee shops in the Home Screen stack widget which is pretty invasive, I’m surprised not to hear about it
basisword · 3h ago
They're not. The Maps widget shows you nearby businesses. You can remove the widget.
natch · 2h ago
My maps widget randomly took me to some BS Apple movie scene location with a bunch of movie branding right in the maps UI. There was nothing nearby about it. It was like two continents away from me.
1oooqooq · 3h ago
so, they're not and you can remove the thing that doesn't exist?
FirmwareBurner · 5h ago
I feel vindicated for when I said that the moment Apple's line stops growing, they'll resort to monetizing their users like the rest of big-tech to increase their shareholder returns, and everyone here was like "Nooo, my sweet innocent publicly traded trillion dollar corporation would never betray me like that". Give it a few more years love, now they're boiling the frog.
rafaelmn · 5h ago
What do you mean start monetizing ? I get adds for their Apple Arcade trial on top of my iOS settings main screen.
I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
seszett · 1h ago
I don't really understand, I don't get ads on my Android phone?
And I'm not sure what you mean about ecosystems either, yes you do need a Google account to download apps from the Play store, but you also need an Apple account to use the Apple store as far as I know.
In my experience it's easier to create a second Google account than a second Apple account.
Now I'm not representative of most users, like all HN users probably. But at home, apart from my M1 Mac (running Linux because I hate macOS) my other machines are Intel n100-based. They work fine.
mrweasel · 4h ago
For the desktop, I could probably just use Linux, but you're right, in terms of eco-system, where would I go?
Phones are even worse. You basically stuck on iOS and Android and I honestly see no situation where picking Android wouldn't be worse. You have a better selection of phone, and you could run /e/OS, Calyx, or something else, but that's just a hassle. I'm not a big fan of the direction iOS is developing, it tried to do way to much and the UI has become a mess.
fsflover · 44m ago
There are also GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone).
fakedang · 4h ago
Graphene OS?
mrweasel · 7m ago
Graphene, Calyx, /e/OS... they work and you can install apps from the Play Store, the feedback I got is just that the few apps I need that can't be replaced keeps breaking. It's just more of a hassle than I'm willing to endure. But you right, it is an option.
jb1991 · 5h ago
You are correct that, just like in politics, you have to pick the best among problematic choices, which will often be Apple.
rglullis · 3h ago
> The M Pro series processor (...)
even if it were the best processor to ever exist, it's not something that we can not live without.
> Linux is a part time job
It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.
jorvi · 4h ago
The biggest trick they ever pulled was changing Music.app into Apple Music, and on first app start showing you a "hey, want to try Apple Music? Tap here" fullscreen.
That single-handedly unlocked a huge cohort of boomers and other tech laypeople that had never tried Spotify or any other music streaming platform before.
It was smart and also a huge abuse of market power. Apple Music would have bombed without it. The only reason they didn't get in deep shit for it was that Apple doesn't have nearly the market capture in the EU that they have in the US, and in that time period the US didn't do antitrust against tech companies.
TheDong · 3h ago
The worse abuse of market power there is that Apple Music doesn't have to pay the 30% to the app store for subscriptions made on the device, but but spotify etc do, so Spotify can't charge a comparable price on iOS, and also wasn't allowed to tell the user in the app that they can subscribe for $x online.
Deceptive app naming has nothing on that.
Toritori12 · 2h ago
As shitty as it is, Chromeos doesnt seem to have a lot bloatware to me.
latexr · 3h ago
> and everyone here was like
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
Ah, sweet vindication. Eventually the only company that doesn't do (all the) bad thing will start doing bad thing.
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
fsflover · 40m ago
> but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future
No, but you should be always ready to jump the ship, always research reasonably good alternatives and never go deep in their walled garden. Ideally, you could even support the efforts to bring the freedom with your money or time, like GNU/Linux phones.
eviks · 5h ago
> destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, to get users to believe that it’s private. That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.
What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?
eptcyka · 5h ago
John Gruber has long been an Apple advocate, not saying this to detract from this post, but rather to add context to those who do not know this.
The F1 is so good that I don’t give a shit about some ad in wallet.
todfox · 14m ago
Even if I wanted to see that movie, I would refuse to watch it purely because I received an unsolicited ad in the Wallet app.
efitz · 4h ago
I think a conclusion has been leaped to that is not necessarily true.
If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.
It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.
triska · 4h ago
I think the article rightly speaks of "trust-erosion" in connection with this incident because, in addition to the showing of ads being subject to the suspicion of surveillance, it raises the question how seriously we can take a wallet app that shows ads or does anything completely unrelated to its designated and propagated purpose, something that is not the reason why this app is used and in fact detracts everyone from the intended use of this app.
The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"
latexr · 2h ago
> If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store)
Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.
> then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?
That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.
> it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.
The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.
> But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.
Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.
ctime · 3h ago
I didn’t see any ads and nobody I know did. This may be a feature in ios26 (the next version in beta) that got leaked out to older versions? Ie a bug)
Ios26 specifically enables promotions in wallet which is viewed as a feature that can be enabled/disabled
mbreese · 2h ago
I saw the ad. iOS 18.5, in the Midwest, with notifications allowed for the Wallet app.
I didn’t find it too intrusive, but it was surprising. It’s probably not a road Apple wants to go further down.
reliablereason · 2h ago
Probably depends on where you live, or some other thing apple knows about you.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
Apple had enjoyed having world-leading crisis communications embodied within Steve and didn’t immediately know what to do when he was gone.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
Tacky things under Jobs were failed experiments. Modern Apple doesn't believe in either experiments or failed experiments.
Apple Vision Pro qualifies here.
Now Apple is a multi trillion dollar company and they can’t take as much risk.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
Here’s him announcing and talking about ads in WWDC: https://youtu.be/eY3BZzzLaaM?si=Dttc5eJJ1B7Zf3sB
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
Lighting doesnt strike twice imho.
Otherwise you get generic slop, eventually.
Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.
The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.
I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…
What are you basing this on, the total number of iPhones sold since 2007? If so, it doesn't account for the users that have bought multiple iPhones.
To most of us, the appeal of Apple has always been primarily that it does what it does well.
I don't think Apple themselves thinks their appeal depends on exclusivity, but rather on a premium experience.
Do you hear yourself?
Yes
Ok you haven’t but what about Ive?
> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.
I denied them the ability to send any notifications on principle, so now it's very annoying to have to check the app to see the status, it makes things worse for both me and them, and I use it less as a result.
Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.
Revolut are really annoying for this. I'm sure there's a few spare days In their development cycle for someone to implement it if they wanted to, but instead they keep everything on the same channel which is 50% promo shit, because you don't want to miss that notification warning you about fraudulent activity on your card.
Well at least it’s acknowledged Apple privacy is only perception and not actually secure or private.
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.
Here’s a little game of insider Apple baseball:
1) why do you think the chief of design isn’t on this page? https://www.apple.com/leadership/
2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?
To keep the guessing game going: what percent of Apple is owned by institutional investors?
Yes it is
What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.
What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.
Here is another angle. If Apple could successfully destroy the In App Ads industry, which they earn nothing from, and force those value into subscription, who will benefit most? Remember Apple tried iAds and earn a percentage of it but failed.
People should at least read PG's Submarine [1] to understand how modern PR and media works. Once you have that understanding the lens of reading anything about Apple becomes a little different.
[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.
From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.
(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
They do the same on my windows computer, ever time I open edge and every time I open a new tab !
This is the kind of behavior I wouldn’t even tolerate in real life, they are really taking us for sheeps.
Did it send a push notification or bother the user? Got a screenshot or reference, since a quick google doesn't uncover it?
The article links to https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/26/apple-wallet-se...
Which links to these examples:
https://x.com/ParkerOrtolani/status/1937551035825807545
https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleWallet/comments/1ljbjrs/how_do...
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/24/apple-wallet-notificati...
(and actually a few more too)
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
I just checked, and I can delete it from my library the same way I can delete any other album.
I was in an older man’s car last year. It started playing the album. He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.
A decade later that album is still annoying people. Bluetooth triggered play or something like that and the only music on the old iPhone started playing.
And the chief complaint is that there is an album in the library.
In practice, actually deleting the Music app on iPhone causes the phone to be unable to connect to cars at all. Without Music installed, you can't even use (e.g.) Spotify in your car.
(Or, at least, that's how it was. Perhaps they've fixed this bug in the 5 or so years since I've tried)
But yes, it's still the insult on top of the injury.
I have this same problem but it plays my wedding playlist from nearly 20 years ago. Some terribly annoying song I no longer like. I assume it’s too much work to delete my library and so I just deal with the annoyance.
Apple did give away free videos on the old Mac OS install cds like widows did. I think to show off quick time and that your computer can play videos (back when that was newish). They didn’t install onto you hard drive..
Edit - it wasn't, my bad, see below.
https://www.rnz.de/cms_media/module_img/176/88193_1_detailxs...
This happened in 2014 and Jobs passed in 2011.
I increasingly use wallet for everything - multiple credit cards, show tickets, transit tickets.
Is there an alternative? Android?
If I wanted Ad spam I would've used Google.
There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?
And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.
The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?
I just want to highlight this because Hacker News can be incredibly dismissive about this.
Apple’s focus on privacy is a competitive advantage. Consumers value it, and Apple’s competitors have business models that undermine it.
Even if you think Tim Cook is the literal devil and Apple will do absolutely anything for a buck, Apple’s focus on privacy is still relevant.
Privacy is valuable to Apple. It’s a wedge they can use against their competitors. Google doesn’t make their fortune selling hardware, they make it selling ads. Privacy is something that gets in the way of Google’s profits.
Because Apple are in this position, it’s profitable to them to champion privacy. It’s something they can do that’s valuable to customers that their competitors are at a disadvantage with.
You don’t have to be a fan of Apple, and you don’t have to trust Apple. All you have to do is believe they want to make money. Being pro-privacy is profitable to Apple, and so they act accordingly.
A great example of this is that they say that iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, and then the second you have an iCloud backup that's completely broken. An actual privacy-centric product, this would be a major problem. Consider Signal.
Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
There is no giant moat between Apple and privacy violation. They'll do it whenever they feel like it, and Apple customers are very forgiving.
It’s not completely broken. For average users, erring on the side of being able to restore from backup is the best choice. For people who need more security, that’s what Advanced Data Protection is for. You have the choice of which option suits you best; I think the default is appropriate for typical users.
> Apple is also the company that tried to introduce client-side content scanning of user photos.
What happened was they put a huge amount of effort into building a system that goes as far as it possibly can to implement CSAM detection that could work on E2E encrypted photo libraries while maintaining as much privacy as possible.
The design of the feature demonstrates they put a lot of effort into privacy – competitors just scan everything that’s uploaded to them, while Apple went above and beyond to do something a lot more difficult. The entire point of it was to detect without Apple having to have access to your photo library. There’s no point to design a system like that if they weren’t prioritising privacy – they could just scan on the server like everybody else if privacy isn’t a priority.
And what happened – everybody freaked out anyway, so they cancelled the feature. It’s an example that supports my point. Apple respond to incentives.
Personally, I wish they hadn’t cancelled the feature. Virtually everybody complaining about it didn’t understand how it worked and thought it worked in a completely different way.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what I was saying. I wasn’t arguing that Apple “really cares” about privacy; quite the opposite – I was arguing that it doesn’t matter if Apple “really cares”, what matters is that they are financially and strategically incentivised to be pro-privacy.
Linux is not Apple’s competitor. Apple only have to be better at privacy than their competitors.
Yeah, that's the sad thing. And on mobile their only competitor is Google... so they don't have to be really good at privacy.
Apple can do no wrong, and if they do wrong, either your expectations were flawed and unreasonable, or it might just have been the accidential hiccup of a single deranged soon-to-be-ex-employee.
Please ignore all the signs and portents that Apple is just another Microsoft or Google, only with a better marketing department and a quasi-religious following...
And there is one! If you don’t recognize that you yourself are subject to some sort of distortion field.
But the truth is, nobody really cares about privacy, least of all, users. Nobody ever bought an iPhone because of "privacy"; people buy iPhones because they work, and because they seem cool. Everyone's happy to hand over data to any service.
Facebook has three billion users.
have you used the app store in the last few years?
I search for my bank and the first results are a load of scammy crypto app ads
then my actual bank app is at result number 3
this is the sort of behaviour I would have expected from Google
Amazon used to sell us items, now ad sales are a big part of their storefront's revenue. Cable used to not have ads.
If you aren't paying, you are the product doesn't also imply that if you paying you are definitely not the product. To the modern exec, everything and everyone is the product. I an surprised that gig economy apps aren't also selling the eyeballs of their workers, making them watch ads to work.
Lack of openness means lack of privacy. If we can't install apps on the side that have proper adblock filtering, then all the promises in the world are hollow.
A closed system that prioritizes privacy will result in more users benefiting from greater privacy overall, even if it does give the platform more control than is ideal. And that's the issue with the wallet ads: Apple makes users more secure on average, but it depends on user trust, which it just betrayed.
Those who can take advantage of total control are a minority, and they are not really the people Apple cares about.
Sensible defaults and warnings about changing them is all you need to put any argument of 'bad for privacy' down.
For me, such a notification is an unwanted intrusion, and it is not compatible with privacy.
"Privacy. That’s Apple.
Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."
So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.
"Apple does have a traditional advertising business, and it does appear to be growing: The folks at Business Insider's sister company EMarketer think it will hit $6.3 billion this year, up from $5.4 billion last year.
And that's not nothing. For context: That's more than the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter generated in 2021, its last full year before Elon Musk bought the company; it's also more than the $4.6 billion Snap generated in 2023."
The article goes on to specify it's only 6% of Apple revenue. But 20% comes from Google and looking at how the antitrust trials are going, that source may soon dry up. The logical conclusion is Apple will aggressively move to make up for the loss by exploiting their captive audience.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-sea...
For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44368854
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44371872
> Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.
Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.
I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.
And I'm not sure what you mean about ecosystems either, yes you do need a Google account to download apps from the Play store, but you also need an Apple account to use the Apple store as far as I know.
In my experience it's easier to create a second Google account than a second Apple account.
Now I'm not representative of most users, like all HN users probably. But at home, apart from my M1 Mac (running Linux because I hate macOS) my other machines are Intel n100-based. They work fine.
Phones are even worse. You basically stuck on iOS and Android and I honestly see no situation where picking Android wouldn't be worse. You have a better selection of phone, and you could run /e/OS, Calyx, or something else, but that's just a hassle. I'm not a big fan of the direction iOS is developing, it tried to do way to much and the UI has become a mess.
even if it were the best processor to ever exist, it's not something that we can not live without.
> Linux is a part time job
It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.
That single-handedly unlocked a huge cohort of boomers and other tech laypeople that had never tried Spotify or any other music streaming platform before.
It was smart and also a huge abuse of market power. Apple Music would have bombed without it. The only reason they didn't get in deep shit for it was that Apple doesn't have nearly the market capture in the EU that they have in the US, and in that time period the US didn't do antitrust against tech companies.
Deceptive app naming has nothing on that.
Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.
> now they're boiling the frog.
That’s a myth.
> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?
No, but you should be always ready to jump the ship, always research reasonably good alternatives and never go deep in their walled garden. Ideally, you could even support the efforts to bring the freedom with your money or time, like GNU/Linux phones.
What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?
If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.
It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.
The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"
Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.
> then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?
That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.
> it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.
The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.
> But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.
Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.
Ios26 specifically enables promotions in wallet which is viewed as a feature that can be enabled/disabled
I didn’t find it too intrusive, but it was surprising. It’s probably not a road Apple wants to go further down.