2026 Apple Introducing More Ads to Increase Opportunity in Search Results
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The rumor that Apple plans to introduce more ads in its search results by 2026 has sparked a heated debate about the tech giant's shifting priorities. While some commenters lament the potential erosion of Apple's "premium" experience, others argue that the company has long since abandoned its innovative edge, instead relying on sleek design and user experience to maintain its market dominance. As one commenter quipped, Apple "takes an idea that's already been worked out and then just out-executes the competition" – a strategy that others counter is, in fact, a form of innovation. The discussion highlights a deeper tension between Apple's commercial ambitions and its loyal user base's expectations.
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Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both. I know the ads themselves aren’t new, but the steady increase is a worrying trend.
I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
I'm not selling my stock just of yet though, as investors like these moves. Layoffs also usually bump the stock price.
Apple has been a mess since they lost Steve Jobs.
It is possible they won’t pull it off for “AI,” of course. But we won’t know until when somebody finds a profitable consumer-facing application for these models.
I wouldn’t have expected Apple to introduce the first AI, for example. I definitely would have expected them to wrap it better than anyone and boy was I wrong about that.
But their innovative design tends to be in hardware and supply chains.
Where Apple can do something useful is using AI to integrate solutions to real world stuff throughout the OS. These features are rarely flashy, but they become an indispensable part of people’s daily workflow.
Current LLMs also seem to have a much higher tolerance for hallucinations than Apple does. I’d rather wait for something good and reliable than have them rush out a copy-cat chatbot that lies to me. People are much more forgiving with OpenAI than they’d be with Apple.
They should release iphone pocket mankini edition as their hallmark of innovative design
I’m inclined to think of that as innovation. To your point, not a single, earth shattering kind (inventing the first mp3 player), but by 100 lesser improvements in a single product.
But yeah, all their stuff is that way. They didn’t invent smartphones, or satellite messaging in a phone, or rich mobile messaging, or end to end encryption of data on your cloud services, or biometrics and secure enclaves, etc. They just usually execute better than others.
Because there are many entirely-feasible things that Apple failed to execute well. Xserve, Airpower, Apple Car, all dead and buried in one way or another. Today, all their tentpole successes are difficult to distinguish from pervasive marketing influence. We can't logically use sales, customer satisfaction or user retention as metrics to measure how successful services iCloud or the App Store are. And, with integrated products like Airpods and Apple Watch, the iPhone nearly reaches similar levels of arbitrary lock-in.
I think the iPad is a good example. Bill Gates had a dream of the paperless office and tried to make the tablet PC happens by putting Windows XP on tablets with some pen support. I saw a few of them in my help desk days in college, but they never really caught on. They put a desktop OS on a tablet and it was annoying to use. They also tried handheld devices with the UMPCs, these were also a pain to use, and again, just ran XP.
Then the iPad came along. It didn’t just run OS X, it ran an OS designed around the way you’d interact with it. It was executed better. Steve Jobs also sold the hell out of it with all his “magic” talk. 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about. Microsoft had a 10+ year head start, but failed to execute and market. They didn’t understand what they were actually making. Android tried to copy the iPad model with a mobile OS, but they didn’t seem to go all-in, so it felt half baked. Much of the iPad “marketing” is word of mouth. My dad had 2 iPads and loves them. He was sold on it by seeing be use one back in 2010 to take note and a conference we went to. He spent more time looking at the iPad than the speakers. Ironically, I don’t have an iPad anymore, it never fit into my workflow, but for many it does.
The marketing only works to remind people of the products of the core product executes well. Marketing alone won’t save a bad product. This is especially true when trying to create a category. Apple has seemed more successful with category creation than just about anyone else. They may not be first, but they define the market and get people to care about it. They did this with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. MP3 players, smart phones, tablets, and smart watches existed before, but were fairly niche. Apple made them mainstream and opened up the market for others to be more successful as well. We can likely credit Apple with that modern laptop as well, starting with the MacBook Air, and then raising the bar on battery life with their new chips. They pushed the whole industry forward. This wasn’t marketing, it was execution. Having 24 hours of battery life in a thin and light package was simply better than the other options on the market.
And it was very successful for years.
Yeah, like a little stylus that you could use to touch the screen and move the mouse pointer around your mini Windows desktop! There was even a way to right-click. Seriously. Cue that sweet picture of a nerdy Bill Gates saying "tablets are so cool!"
When was the last time anybody talked about the iPad outside of a product launch event? iPad sales are falling [0]. It, like every other type of tablet, is a glorified YouTube/Netflix player for most people. It doesn't do anything that you can't already do on an iPhone. Even on "pro" iPad apps like Final Cut, exports are cancelled if you so much as switch to another app during the process. It is in no way a MacOS device.
[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/2865180/iphone-sales-pump-u...
[1] https://www.macstories.net/stories/not-an-ipad-pro-review/
But yeah, that was decades ago. And with Jobs, innovation has left.
Your statement is in itself a testament to their success in marketing and something which can be seen in many places: someone develops a product, the product gets some traction on the market, people seem to like the concept. Other companies also start making similar products which also gain some traction but it remains just that, a new product in a sea of many such. Then along comes the fruit factory which takes the product, wraps it in its trademark Dieter Rams-inspired shape, puts a large fruit stamp on it and markets it to the bone to their loyal audience. Pretty soon that audience will claim that the product was 'invented' by the fruit factory, that it is 'insanely great', that nobody has done something like this before and if they did they copied it from the fruit factory, etc.
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either.
Besides the point: I personally find the Nomad Jukebox and other MP3 players from the era extremely ugly, while the iPod looks beautiful and has become an icon (yes, Rams-inspired, but that's not a bad thing). I say this as a decidedly non-Apple-fanboy, but as an industrial designer.
"Wireless" refers to FM radio, it's an Australianism
I've still got it somewhere but the HDD has died.
It had 6 GB of storage [1]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad#Nomad_Jukebox_Z... - second to last paragraph
1: https://www.manualslib.com/manual/576463/Creative-Nomad-Juke...
> Second, I think Apple is using this as a "sneaky" device to sneak large capacity hard drives into our pockets. Basically, once we're used to carrying around something like this, they can build on it. Add the PalmOS or OSX/CE (OK, bad joke, but you get the idea) and you have a PDA with more massive storage than any other. Add a firewire connection to some optics and you have a video camera with 10 hours of battery life, smaller and easier to conceal than Sony's smallest. The thing I like about the video camera idea is that with tapeless storage, editing is much, much faster, and with the disk unit in your pocket, the camera can be really tiny and lightweight and still have a lot of features. Basically, once they up the drive capacity to 20GB (maybe 3-6 months?), that's enough for 90 minutes of broadcast quality digital video, enough for almost any common event! Think about it. This is just an iSeed iPod. Many other things can and probably will grow out of it.
In my recollection, though, a bigger hard drive did not really feel like an innovation. It might have just been that I was a kid, but my music library was not so huge, and it was possible to reduce the file sizes anyway (especially given how crappy ear buds were at the time, and anyway, how good was the dac in a cheap mp3 player at the time?).
We were used to the idea that hard drive sizes might make a big jump anyway, it was still the era of dramatic leaps and bounds.
Finally, you probably had a binder full of CDs anyway (burned CDs if you were cool of course), so you could play them in a car. So, the concept of having much more “drive space” in some sense was not at all new. (And the UI of a binder full of CDs is much more intuitive than any MP3 player!).
Rather, the iPod didn’t really have any big new ideas. It’s just that nothing about it sucked. The hard drive was pretty big, the UI was good enough, the clickey wheel thing was fun, the audio quality was fine. No new ideas, B+ all around, and nothing to make you want to given up on it.
I'm confused by this take. We've had this for over a decade? Technology is not holding this idea back. It just sucks big time for every situation except driving. Talking to a computer is dumb, but Knight Rider nailed it.
The UI for setting up a daily alarm is a little clunky, since it requires individually selecting each day. I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours. Instead of doing this manually, I asked Siri to do it and it was much easier.
As an easter egg, you can even use some Harry Potter spells. “Lumos” will turn the flashlight on, “nox” will turn it off.
Not everything needs a bunch of AI. Most OS operations and settings are probably better without it, other than maybe for helping to process intent if it’s unclear.
In case you didn’t know, there is a medication reminder built into Apple Health that might work better than an alarm.
Wow, who could have expected that to happen?!
Yeah, not gonna happen, no ads means ownership of a device. That must be prohibited at all cost. Unless you are one of those pesky grapeneos users that block ads but they'll soon be excluded from any public discourse by eID enforcement.
You vill watch tze Ads and you vill eat tze bugs.
In all likelihood, we will pay an extra $100 AND have ads.
And if you think there's a definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading, I think that's an extraordinary claim you have no evidence for.
Go lead a maoist insurgency or don't, but the fingerwagging moral appeal is worse than useless.
Well gee, when you put it like that all morality is relative huh?
As with almost everything, it's both. Some morality is relative, some is absolute.
Morality being absolute means just that you subjectively consider some moral rules absolute. Doesn't make them so, the way the law of gravity is absolute.
And it doesn't mean that every human society agrees to what you consider "absolute".
All things you consider "absolute", there are whole societies which found them to be just fine, and you'd do too if you were raised in them, including incest, murder of innocents, slavery, torture...
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
There were millennia of efforts to end slavery, but it's only the technological and industrial revolution that finally succeeded in doing so. But the point is that even though Aristotle was ostensibly not opposed to slavery, he nonetheless knew it was a decision that needed justification because it was fundamentally repulsive, even in a society where it was ubiquitous and relatively non-controversial, thousands of years ago.
This 'natural repulsion' is, I think, some degree of evidence for persistent, if not absolute, morality throughout at least thousands of years of humanity's existence, and I see no reason to assume it would not trend back long further than that.
[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.mb.txt
Most "naturally repulsive" things were accepted just fine in one society or another.
Aristole spent time to defend and rationalize slavery because that was just job, to spend time rationalizing things. Other societies practiced it with no such worries, and found it perfectly natural.
But even if we grant you your "naturally repulsive" actions existing, it doesn't mean they are objectively morally wrong. Just that their moral judgement is not just based on culture and historical period, but also on evolutionary adaptations. These could very well be considered fine in an earlier/later evolutionary stage (in an earlier one, for sure: animals don't have such qualms).
It's fine if you're personally a coward or you just don't think it's worth it. But not only does it work, it is so far, the only thing that has ever been proven to work.
I meant that this is reductionist:
> definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
If I were to stoop to your level of reasoning and inquiry, I could simply say that you are are a racist and a sexist for disagreeing with me with just as much basis.
If we're speaking of democratic governments you usually get to vote (whatever ineffective). And if we're speaking for non monopolistic corporations you also get to buy from another. With mafia there's a single, non-negotiable, option: the one running your area.
And both for goverments and corporations, there are other parties (e.g. courts) limiting what they can do.
If I had to guess, the Mafia will have professional economists on payroll telling the bosses about the Laffer curve and emigration.
But in this context, Apple's clearly on the low end of the Laffer curve* because they don't need a million apps, so who cares if the store fees are 15% or 85%, the supply is still there?**; while for emigration, being the least bad of the Apple/Google duopoly is all that is necessary.
* if you take literally that the App store fee is the "Apple tax"
** Answer: Judges in market abuse/monopoly cases because Apple is not actually sovereign; on paper neither is the Mafia, but this is where "monopoly on violence" is a useful definition of a state, in that where anything like the Mafia can exist, the state is de facto not sovereign no matter what it says on paper.
Can we please discuss how this comment is relevant to the Apple's discussion and how it fits in perhaps too.
It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
Publicly-traded companies fairly consistently follow a particular arc. At first they produce something people like, and thereby become popular. This is often before they go public. Then they grow for a while, until the market becomes saturated. But they're a public company, so they're still expected to grow. And if you can't get more users, the only thing you can do is extract more out of each one.
That's enshitification in a nutshell.
People often suggest things like "consumer protection" regulations, but then you get malicious compliance and regulatory capture. There are only really two things that work:
The first is that the company is still controlled by a founder who actually cares about their reputation. This works pretty well when you can find it, but it tends not to last. Eventually people die or retire.
The second is competition. Not a duopoly where they each point to the other and claim there's an alternative while mirroring every bad act of their partner in crime. Actual competition, where the market share of new companies that have only entered the market in the last 5 years isn't zero. This is why e.g. Costco can be rated higher than Comcast by an amount represented by the difference in altitude between a scenic view at a state park and the depths of hell.
And so that's where you really want to direct regulatory efforts. Breaking up companies in concentrated markets, repealing regulations that raise barriers to entry or allow incumbents to lock out competitors, etc.
I think users should have 0 tolerance for ads in the OS. It’s the broken window theory. Once they start, if the users don’t revolt, they will keep pushing them.
I find I don’t use the App Store much anymore. I used to browse it all the time, but it feels like one giant advertisement now.
Also available as part of Apple One if you buy 2TB of extra iCloud storage.
Only under our current cultural and economic assumptions.
I think we shouldn't hope those changes, that could lead to interesting times.
Whatever his faults, he had a high bar for user experience, a massive megaphone, and the respect of journalists, industry leaders, and the public.
Apple's market differentiator, under Steve Jobs, was that it wasn't shitty.
Jobs would regularly mock competitors publicly for the way in which they 'enshittified' their products (in words of the time, obviously). And his reputation was such that people listened.
We have a dearth of authority figures today; there's nobody around to shame bad actors.
Worse. The bad actors have become the authority figures.
Yeah, but what about next quarter?
Jokes aside, they're not the most valuable company anymore. Nvidia is ahead, I think MS has jockeyed with them on that position a few times and is still on their heels, and Google is ascendant (even ahead of MS as of end of close) after the antitrust clouds started to recede and Gemini started to match Claude and ChatGPT.
They can't sit idly forever if they want to please shareholders, and there aren't many avenues for expansion.
Point being, why fuck with a strategy that is working? Is being #1 so important that you'll throw it all away because of an unpredictable and outlier event that isn't in competition with you? That seems incredibly irrational and a great way to lost your market advantage. It is incredibly myopic.
Of course they are, they are on the same stock market.
What, are you one of those that believe competition is still about capturing markets and appeasing customers?
Both have had ads in apps, in app stores and on websites. This was never a differentiator.
I have exactly one ad supported app on my phone - Overcast. Mobile games have become so enshittified they aren’t interesting.
The only reason I haven’t paid for ad free Overcast is just because when I was about to in order to support an indie developer, the author introduced his own ad platform that wasn’t scammy and its ads for other podcasts in the same category for the one you are actually listening to. I found his ads good and I found other interesting podcasts because of it.
If iOS goes that route I really don't know what the differentiator is
I watched an "Android user switched to iOS" YouTube video recently and it's interesting how much you don't see when you haven't been removed from an environment. This Android user was shocked at how much iOS advertises to you, which is not intuitively what any of us would think an Android user would be shocked by switching platforms.
You know how when you haven't seen a friend for a long time and they've changed appearance? But if you see them every day you don't really notice the gradual changes as much. I think that's what's happening here: long time iOS users just don't see that Apple is using all the same tactics as Microsoft and Google in their OSes, but Windows especially is seen as hyper-commercial and ad-riddled.
iOS has what are effectively ads in the Settings page in exactly in the same way that you get critical updates which is crazy.
Every major OS update advertises some new feature that siphons up your personal data like Apple Intelligence. Heck, they suggest you turn analytics back on years after turning it off - every single major update! I know this is common practice but we have to pause and recognize that these things are advertisements.
You think Windows is bad with OneDrive and Copilot? At least you can uninstall those! Try removing Apple News on your Mac! You can't delete the app, not allowed!
Congratulations, you bought a piece of hardware from Apple, now you get a 3-month trial to [random service they run] and you will be notified about this in the settings page...again, right next to your critical security updates.
App Store? It's an ad platform, not a package manager. Sure, another industry standard, but it's not like Apple is some kind of unique premium company in this regard.
Apple TV is touted as having no ads, but it really does if you don't move Apples apps off the top row of the screen. For now, it's far less egregious than any other streaming box I can think of, but I imagine it's this way because the product is a bit of an afterthought that predates Apple's orange squeezing (we are the oranges).
Where do profits come from? Selling data, innovation, selling hardware, etc.
Biggest profit margins come from selling stuff you have to multiple buyers that costs you nothing to duplicate/produce.
My data can be sold to multiple buyers, multiple times to make that magic profit that shareholders want.
Just wait until everyone on this planet has apple devices, how will apple continue to grow ROI?
Does Android have less ads? Which company does hardware integration so well? What are the alternative to an Apple tech stack?
So in the end, the consumer is left to sucking it up, counting their shareholder profits and suffering on a remote island in the sun.
Newsflash: the first slot in an app store search is an ad that is not marked as such. Your extra $100 are already wasted.
Here's a nice ad I ran into recently:
https://imgur.com/a/sq1HFHK
I was trying to install microsoft authenticator and the first "result"... I don't want to know what that is.
If they add more ads at the top I suppose I'll have to only use external searches to install apps.
Maybe it's clear to you...
I want all the ads to go away, and misleading apps should be removed from the store and certainly not promoted via ads… but I also don’t want ads to be flashing and being annoying in the name of being “clearly” market. Some people won’t notice anything, no matter how obvious.
Not on my phone. Set to dark mode.
Btw, I'm checking now, the label "ad" is not there, it's just highlighted. Or is it that blue tag? I thought that signified in-app ads? Shouldn't the highlight itself have a label? Probably this is some A/B test optimized BS, that tag was the option where most people WRONGLY clicked on the stuff they didn't search for.
When I came from Android I first couldn't figure out why app store search was so bad. Dumb me, expecting the highlighted option to be something most relevant to ME and MY search, no it's most relevant to some paying company and can even be a scam. And you an me can reason through this, but my ids get this BS as well.
Absolute disappointment on day 1 with iOS.
But it really pisses me off when I spend money on something, and then after that it enshitifies (ie Philips/Signify Hue).
Ah well, being annoyed by and pissed off at iOS just makes me spend less time on the thing, so that's good.
You piled a whole lot of arguments, but doesn't change the fact that it's still clearly labelled.
"White tet on a pale blue background" still readable.
"very busy UI", not particularly, and people can still read all the other stuff in it.
Besides, you only need to notice this box once to be able to tell whether something marked the same way is an ad or not in the future.
Your opinion.
That we're even debating that this is clearly labeled as an ad is crazy talk.
These responses are a bit surprising. I wonder how people would have responded if this were about Android.
That is, in the most deceiving way they could think of while still being able to say they marked it.
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
> Increasing ads, or having them at all, really erodes the user experience
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads
As someone who uses both Android and iOS (the dual usage being in large part because I develop software for both) if this were about Android I wouldn't be surprised in the least, but I do find it surprising for Apple to increasingly allow for this sort of thing.
IMO the major positive differentiators Apple has over Google as a phone OS provider are the perception of protecting user privacy and also not plastering ads everywhere. This example weakens both of those perceptions at the same time.
So (for me) its not about Apple being worse than Google when it comes to this stuff, its just surprising they are willing to be as bad.
But what's worse than an ad is that too many times these apps are actually scammy. A whole host of apps with almost identical and misleading names, icons, banner pictures, descriptions, developer names, and so on.
Ok, I search for Netflix and you show me Prime first is one think. But showing me a scam app is a different offense altogether. And it doesn't matter if your phone costs $600 or $1600 you'll get served up to the scammers just the same.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/BkGmPGc
Context: we're migrating to MS cloud services at work from Google so everyone is setting up accounts, authenticators etc. Pretty seamless migration overall btw, guess our admins worked like dogs.
So I post this screenshot in a work chat as a warning (that's why i still have it). All my Android using colleagues tell me "it's the same in the Play Store, watch what you click."
We've lost.
“When I search for something, I have to flick my finger a quarter inch to scroll past an ad! It’s the end of all that is good in the world!”
Absolute garbage experience, and I came from Android expecting to "the luxury platform", I paid 2x what I usually do for a Phone. What a disappointment in step 1.
Though lately I feel like Apple is just really bad at being... Apple
It's like they are dumping all the good parts and doubling down on all the bad parts. Things are far from "just working", have more glitches/bugs, but at the same time they're increasing hostility towards developers and walled garden. At least with Android (or linux) I can fix any issues but with Apple it's more "fuck you, deal with it." This was frustrating but passable when it was more streamlined but now? God fucking damnit I swiped one word just fine but when swiping the second word you decide the first word wasn't correct and none of the suggestions are what I'm intending to type but pressing delete deletes both words and now I can't swipe the original word because you already decided I'm not trying to type that word because I pressed delete? This is version of Apple is just rotten... When literally typing on a phone is a daily frustrating experience you know you fucked up. I mean how long have they even failed to capitalize a singular "i"? What the fuck is going on over there?
Side note:
Try searching "Claude" in the iPhone app store. For me I get a half page ad for Gemini, a small result for Claude, and then a larger result for Grok. Literally the thing I searched for, and has an unambiguous result, is the smallest thing on the page! This is some bullshit dark patterns that is very anti-user.
"You are holding it wrong", maybe it's intentional and Apple decided that you should use Siri more
And btw, I have "auto-correct" disabled and this stupid bug still happens. Which is to say, yes, I agree, Apple is user hostile.
Sitting on a tons of value (even though backed by users trust) gives no rest to Apple's managers who just does not connect the dots between users trust and profits.
Or they think they are a monopoly. Maybe Apple is?
How?
Doesn't making good products that people want give more insight to user needs?
I always wonder how apple's marketing team pulled this off.
- If you use any decent browser like Firefox* (or its different clones) one get enhanced privacy, no ads, byepasspaywalls etc. - Even Chromium forks have decent adblocking - Using NewPipe (like revanced opensource) for ad free YouTube
All my iOS friends scroll through so many ads - admittedly - SIM/data is paid for my their employers but it is awful experience.
* -> Don't be pendantic and point out yesterday's Verge article that Mozilla is becoming bad.
Your friends are only scrolling through ads because they haven’t installed an ad blocker. They have been available for iOS Safari for over a decade - since iOS 8.
It's especially obvious if you don't subscribe to paid iCloud and see ads for "Apple Arcade", "Increase iCloud Drive storage space", "Sign up for Apple Music", "Have you heard of Apple Fitness+" or "New show on Apple TV+"-push notifications everywhere. Something that in theory they discourage to use these for promotional messages, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.
Both app stores always felt like fumbling in the dumpster. Between the ads and the gambling, if you managed to find an app that treated you right it was like finding a baby who was somehow living despite choking in all the ashes
Turns out that doesn't work, either
When a company that sits on enormous reams of cash, and positions itself as a premium brand, goes for a fistful of dollars more per customer by showing them ads, it can mean two things. One is that it's a cold calculated move, another, that it's clueless enthusiastic "brilliant idea". In either case, the company is going to burn a lot of its customers' goodwill, and much of its longer-term prospects, in exchange for some more immediate revenue, and higher stock valuation.
What looks like stupidity in doing such a move is more likely cynicism. The corporate officers who will reap the benefits will retire by the time when their successors would have to handle the fallout. It's not stupidity, it's rot at the highest echelons.
This would explain the really poor recent software decisions, and the general decline of its quality.
But at least Apple still has amazing, best-in-class hardware! Well, like Nokia did. And like Blackberry did. Like Boeing used to.
Sad :(
You're already paying a huge premium on the phone.
With the average lifetime of a phone these days $100 might not justify it.
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