Apple Is Crossing a Steve Jobs Red Line

That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.

Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases.

(But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)

- I search for "restaurants" and someone is having a special

- A trampoline park opens near me, I'd like it to catch my eye

- I've been googling chocolates recently, so populate the map with chocolate shops

- Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway

I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.

Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc

If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained.

I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff.

Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products.

yeah, but that ship has sailed.

But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.

Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.

Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product.

It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.

If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.

This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.

Why would they care if they can just lock the gates and put some barbed wire on top of the walls? What are you going to do, move to Android?

I already have a ThinkPad X series running Linux as a secondary machine, so I can see what that side of the fence is like and it’s going to take either a colossal screwup on Apple’s part or a massive improvement on the x86 laptop industry’s part of switching to be possibility.

Related to your second paragraph, I have a 2017 MBP that just end-of-lifed so we're gonna try Linux on that.

And the M line is fast. A pretty good computer for the money. That said, I hear getting Linux running on those platforms is troublesome and may be a path that Apple is actively fighting against. And if I can't install Linux, that makes the computer premature landfill fodder which pisses me off.

I love the Framework concept, but you'll pay for the privilege. Not sure what's next for me.

I honestly don't know this is just a question.

> It’s WWDC week. Every time this rolls around, I see people saying the same sort of thing. “Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done this”.

> Firstly, Jobs wasn’t perfect. He got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. His opinion wasn’t the end of the argument when he was alive, and it’s certainly not now that he’s been dead 14 years.

> But more importantly: Stop putting your opinion in a dead man’s mouth to give it more credibility. It’s ghoulish. Let your opinion stand on its own two feet.

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44246274

In a crowded market, making a completely innovative visual identity is often the only option. One hopes that the result is that the words "forward-looking" and "trend-setting" and "loyalty-inspiring" and "inimitable" begin to apply. And if they pull it off, more power to them!

But there's a matter of taste as well as novelty. And while there were many incredible things about Metro, history bears witness to how much Zune and Windows Phone and Windows 8 have become beloved household names in the decade-and-a-half since.

I do think that Jobs would have signed off on the motivation behind Liquid Glass. I do not think he would have signed off on Liquid Glass itself.

That wouldn't be so bad if the borders around the Home Screen icons didn't look so ugly with black background.

Apple devs are constantly attacking people on Twitter for complaining about Safari bugs but the front-end workflow is a waterfall because of Safari. You get your code working in every other browser and then rewrite it to work around all of the Safari issues.

The iPhone 5 was revealed a year after Jobs stepped down as CEO and his death shortly after. The design was almost surely locked in while he was still CEO.

The original iPhone had a 2-toned back too.

> iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.

See, I disagree with your entire premise here. Apple, unlike Google, has a very very profitable hardware business which provides so much to the bottom line that they don't have to operate Apple Maps or Apple Search or Calculator as a self-sustaining business with its own P&L. It's stupid to operate as though they must.

The correct thinking (in my not so humble opinion) for a long-term-minded company is to recognize:

1. That massive firehose of money allows them to make Maps markedly better than what Google can afford to do. Since Apple gave up on UI/UX design excellence, this ability to not rely on ads is arguably their only remaining differentiated advantage.

2. Part of what allows Apple to command such monster-sized margins is that (usually... so far... outside of the App Stores at least) their product is not packed full of sleazy ads that significantly detract from the experience. You don't just get to fully enshittify the product and still command the same high prices as you did when you were offering a premium product. A Porsche covered in wraps advertising porn sites and penis pills, which plays loud AI-generated ads on every screen all day long would not sell at the price a normal one does.

Yes. The point of willingly putting yourself in the walled garden was that the experience was definitively better than the other options.

When the walled garden ceases to be better and starts adopting all the same dark patterns and user hostile experience as everyone else, what point is there in staying inside?

> and I think for many Apple customers

Unfortunately, I think people who care about this enough to leave are a rounding error. It’s why the entire consumer product market looks the way it does.

Until now I blamed Google, but now it seems much more likely that it was Apple’s fault.

If it is AI wtf is it even doing there though? It adds nothing. A quick search returns a bunch of images where Jobs looks annoyed or trying to stop something.