> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience.

YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!

It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.

I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?

ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:

Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.

Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.

Ads in Maps and how that contrasts with the customer experience is the message here.

I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...

Steve aside, I find this particular article's observation that ads in maps is a bad customer experience something I can agree with.

Most Apple veterans and current will agree and tell you they do not like the direction the company has gone/is going.

Most are still there as Apple has one of the most stable employment places, ever. I know a lot of old senior Apple folks who all come back to Apple to retire as the benefits are good, pay is ok, and it’s beyond stable.

To this end, including the way Apple operates, it’s low noise and low friction to just coast and let the leadership team duke it out over revenue streams.

Sadly iPhone sales and revenue saturated like 4 years ago (and the same for Mac, Wearables and iPad [0]). They focus now a lot on growing revenue from services. Which is kind of sad because they have still much room to grow Mac and iPad:

- just make iPad more useful and support MacOS - it's not gonna canibalize Mac, they sale each year 2x more iPads than Macs and 12x more iPhones than Macs.

- make macbook Pro standard with 32GB RAM / 1TB drive (macbook air with 500GB) and cheaper upgrades. It's not like those chips are expensive. Better to sell 2x more devices with smaller margin than holding to your margin like virginity.

As for services they could go other way:

- be AI gateway like OpenRouter and charge user 10% for token credits topup like electricity bill. Devs then don't have to setup back-end, protect API key, setup billings, auth etc or charge end user more with subscription.

- make powerful Apple TV or cheaper Mac Mini for all users. Create a distributed computing platform that user can opt-in. Now you are competing with CloudFlare. Those devices normally do nothing during night but could generate/compute stuff, execute some lambda in sandbox, work as a proxy. Give 30-50% for device upgrades for such users that opted-in for 2 years.

[0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/metrics/revenue-by-seg...

> One [way to integrate ads] was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up.

Of course Jobs blocked this, but it's insane that it was even proposed as a serious idea. I'm pretty sure this would have been a PR stain on Apple even in the pre-social media era.

I ran a reverse image search on the image of Steve Jobs, and couldn't come up with anything, so it does appear that it might be AI generated, which I don't approve of.

The very first thing I saw from Apple that, IMO, Jobs would have vehemently stopped was the two-toned back on the iPhone 5.

That said, the iOS 26 release is abysmal. The only redeeming thing for me has been the enhancements to Stage Manager, everything else with the UI/UX is such a mess that every day it seems like I'm discovering something new in the realm of awful design. And this isn't limited to minor nitpicks, there are major CTAs that are essentially "black on black" and practically not visible below 50% screen brightness and not acceptably visible at max brightness. Just last night I noticed the browser tabs will render full color content behind the text. It's so bad I've been considering cataloging screenshots and writing about it, because some of it's laughably bad.

Remember that Steve Jobs appointed his COO Tim Cook to take over Apple. Not Ives or Cue or Federighi. I've always seen this as an acknowledgment that without Jobs the company would not be able to innovate in the same way.

Having acknowledged that, Apple shifted to the value extraction phase of its business lifecycle.

It sucks.

It like when your favorite band starts selling out, but as publicly traded company, I am not sure it is avoidable.

> Why would Apple do such a thing?

Because Steve is not around to rip these MBA-types a new asshole for even mentioning such crap.

Tim is not a visionary leader. He is a great manager who can manage logistics like nobody else and deliver the finished product.

But Steve was the visionary leader: he laid out the plan of where they were going, sold his troops on the big picture and Tim helped get the troops there.

If it really was a red line, why did Steve even take the meeting, and then take days to decide on it?

They crossed it definitively, and still unbelievably, to me, when they started showing ads as the first result in App Store search. For a long time searching "ChatGPT" in the AppStore would surface a rip-off clone w/ a lookalike icon as the first result. How many thousands of users inadvertently downloaded the clone, paid for it, and were, basically, victims of a scam, facilitated by Apple? (Now the first result for ChatGPT, Claude, Grok is at least the correct first party ad, though this almost seems like extortion on the part of Apple.)

(Software quality has also fallen off a cliff, though that's more a loss of instutional competence, I think, than active anti-user behavior motivated by avarice.)

Is that AI Steve Jobs in the header image? Pretty uncanny and takes away from the article.

So I wonder what alternatives to iPhone or Mac would you recommend? It seems to me that neither Google nor Microsoft is doing better. Google appears to prioritize ad-revenue over user experience, and Microsoft is following in that direction too.

Who cares? He’s dead. I know that sounds harsh but this obsession and worship of founders has to stop. Companies are people or so says the Supreme Court. So now that the company exists it’s bigger than any one person even the founder.

The company he built is now an order of magnitude more valuable and hardware is the best it’s ever been.

It’s maturing. No company stays nimble and vibrant and agile forever. It’s paying a dividend for Pete’s sake.

All these callbacks to oh no apple under Steve never would have done this … yeah well it’s 2025 and he unfortunately got cancer and died from it. Apple as a company lives on and new leadership should be free to take it in any direction they seem justified.

I don’t care about whatever Jobs thought, but honestly I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better.

Their hardware is still amazing, but I’ve had enough issues with software quality and Cook’s penny pinching philosophy that I’ve bought a second hand laptop to explore moving to Linux.

So far, the experience is making me question whether my next main driver will be a MacBook.

> This is how Steve laid out his plan to us at the ad agency when he returned to a nearly bankrupt Apple in the late 1990s. The customer experience was all-important.

Yes, it is a well-known truth that CX drives product success, and if you want to credit Jobs for that, fine.

But referencing back to the 90s because Jobs talked to you directly 25 years ago truly dilutes the message. It is really weird, honestly, to claim that a business strategy from decades ago when Apple was in a completely different reality is some sacrosanct policy that shall never be questioned.

I'm not saying the policy is wrong - I agree with it. So do most product managers I know. But all organizations change over time. Society changes. Tech changes. A viewpoint wherein you have "red lines" that cannot be challenged is short-sighted.

I will never understand why some companies turn away from some of the core principles that got them to their position.

If it’s market pressure, it tells me that Cook doesn’t really believe their future roadmap is good enough for growth, so he needs to hedge with other things that make the product worse. Of course those very things will hurt future growth. That’s how an upward spiral turns downward.

Interesting read. But I avoid deifying Jobs. I won't be surprised if he went ahead with Ads for revenue. Who wouldn't! If he were around the iPhone would not be dramatically different than what it's now.

I am checking this carefully. The red line is here, for me and I think for many Apple customers. I choose Apple for being different from other companies, for valuing customer experiences and for rejecting ads and other "insults" for users. I think that if they cross the line, me and many other customers will leave.

What's with this uncanny AI Steve Jobs photo? I hope blog writers have red lines too.

The sentiment of this article seems to be praising Jobs as a protector of user experience. And the author doesn't have the decency to use his real face?

I probably sound like a broken record, but the death of Apple won't come from being behind on AI, from losing developer support, from bad products or services. Fundamentally, it'll be because it is optimising for being on the stock market and chasing endless revenue growth.

All other issues I've outlined is a symptom of that fundamental issue. Apple is losing its soul.

The author suggests Steve would have done something based on what Steve did in the past in that particular set of circumstances. But it's not fair to suggest what Steve would have done today, given where Apple is now. Would Steve have said "screw it" to the share price and just ran the company with the same ethos? Maybe, he was bold like that. But then he also had a Board to answer to.

> What made Steve an effective and visionary leader was that his values were so crystal clear.

Steve also underpaid developers - see the court proceedings here.

I am not saying Steve was not creative and effective, mind you. He was that. But he also had a criminal side, and I hate this whitewashing of praising Steve without pointing at the criminal side at the same time. See reports such as this one here:

https://www.thedrum.com/news/steve-jobs-named-top-conspirato...

The media is often not critical of the superrich, even more so when it is owned by them, which is why unaffiliated media must be a LOT more critical in general. The whole article here babbles about how great Steve Jobs is and how bad Tim Cook is. I'd rather like to think that both are or were humans with failure points.

Standards sure have dropped. I saw a new iPad mini in store, on display, and it simply couldn’t run the home screen without stuttering and visible frame rate drops! At least in my mind, this seems like a transgression from Apple’s former standards and that’s before the accessibility and visual challenges new iOS has.

I don't understand why car-based things can have ads or updates that popup or things like that. My car (2024 Subaru) + Android Auto is so restrictive that I can't even type a search query into the screen while I'm parked, I have to speak to it. Yet, while I was out grocery shopping the other day the thing popped up multiple times asking me if I wanted to start an update "That would require you to turn your car off for 5-10 minutes"

It popped up a second time as I SLOWED DOWN at a red light. I didn't even come to a complete stop but apparently that was "stopped" enough for it to pop up.

Not to mention while you're using Google Maps the whole time it's popping up asking "Is that cop still there? Is there still construction?" and they're looking for you to click on a button on the car's screen that indicates yes/no. However, when I'm parked at a rest area trying to look for the nearest cracker barrel it'll start navigating me automatically to one that's 45min in the wrong direction instead of just letting me pick which one I want to go to.

And now, ads will show in Apple Maps? Ah yeah, when I'm driving is definitely the best time to distract me for your own greed!

It's asinine. Obviously the "Safety features" are just performative. Probably so they can force us to have a mic enabled or something. It's bs.

The “Guides We Love” feature in Apple Maps is my a great example of this. When I first saw it I was appalled by its complete uselessness. It’s hard to understand how an Apple team could have created and actually shipped such a waste of space.

Edit: deleted a couple of company references that weren’t needed to make my point.

They will always put ads into everything. Doesn't matter what they say, eventually someone's gonna show up and notice that money is being left on the table by not advertising to all those users. Paying them just makes your attention even more valuable.

I don’t think Apple fundamental issues are that hard to fix. First, you need to fire whoever is leading the UX on the OS side. Hardware design is still pretty good. Then we can argue about their lack of innovation and missing the AI train, which btw is still not proven to be a bad (lack of) strategy. But until they don’t get the fundamentals right at the OS UX experience nothing else matters. I hate iOS with passion, both on my phone and Apple Watch, it feels like a Beta version most of the time.

the biggest mistake is thinking the rising revenue share of services adds diversification and makes Apple less dependend on iPhone revenue because barely anyone would choose Apple services if they didn't have an iPhone.

Very ironic but so much of tech ultimately comes down to taste and Tim Cook obviously just doesn't have it.

I don't use my phone much other than you know, for calling and occasional messaging. For me the most annoying is constant asking of password in both phone and mac. It's so secure.

Could be wrong, but the photo of Steve Jobs at the top of the article looks AI. Disturbing suspicion.

How much f'n money do these massive corporations really need?

Tim Apple is a money grubbing robot with zero taste. Absolutely the bean counter type that Steve used to rail against.

He makes IBM look cool in conparison.

I think they’re trying to replace the hole they expect when the app stores are forced to be open. It is sad they lack any plan other than ads, it’s a complete lack of imagination from what is supposed to the one of the most innovative companies on earth. I feel this is a more worrisome signal than anything.

> and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience.

"brutally" is the only factual part, otherwise he harmed the experience plenty, often for the sake of appearances

Goggle also had a memo on how ads were bad and rejected the idea ... until they didn't, with the same founders, so you don't need much of a leadership change for the strong incentive of ad money to dilute the resolve.

I think you can point to the actual day Apple started this decline they're still on: September 16 2015. That was the day Apple News was released, which I think as a product perfectly encapsulates near-everything wrong with Apple in one convenient package.

I don't think apple executives understand what made apple so successful.

Or maybe I'm out of touch ? I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

But to me, i buy apple because this a premium device that is well thought out and doesn't make me waste time on advertisement, dark pattern and other bullshit i don't have the time nor the will to care about.

I ditched windows for macos after the candy crush saga in start menu and just the overall philosophy of windows 10. For instance, not being able to decide if I want to update and when.

I ditched Android because Google made me loose so much time with their ad riddled services, and their app professionalism is abysmal. It constantly change, no user interface is the same,...

For all these reasons I bought expensive apple devices and I tolerated the many bugs, often having to restart my iphone once every day.

Now if you're going to monetize me just as the other and make me waste my time fiddling around on apple maps checking if one thing is an ad or something I actually want to see, I'll just buy the cheapest thing I can get.

There is no reason to pay premium for the same quality.

But that's just me, maybe they know something I don't. Brand fidelity, especially in the USA is strong, people don't want to be that guy who has an Android ? iPhone are status symbols in China ?

To me the really question is how that impacts my privacy. I’m okay with Ads in their software as long as it doesn’t negatively impact my privacy.

It’s obvious that many of google services have huge negative impacts on my privacy, which is why I buy from apple.

Does nobody else remember Apple intentionally reducing battery life so you'd have to buy new phones?

Crossing the red line has consequences … though not immediately…

> Some time ago (1999-ish) [...] a number of ways to integrate ads were discussed.

> One was to show a cool video from a respected company (such as Nike) every time the Mac starts up. [...]

This sounds so weird in 2025. However, I can see that probably in those times there was no "norm", and people were trying different things.

Who knows, maybe if it weren't for Steve Jobs, ads at startup might be the norm. And who knows how many similar things we dodged because of people like Jobs.

These moves are the dumbest thing Apple can do for the long- term. It is one of the few differentiators they have between Android and Windows.

The App Store ads are one thing, it is a store after all, but adding ads to a core OS functionality like Maps is clear degradation of service. When people spend 1 to 2 grand on a premium phone they don’t expect to see ads, ever.

Apple is far gone, macOS has been buggy for a while. At first I thought this was in favor of iOS, but seeing how iOS usability has suffered, and how they are squandering their reasources on pointless redesigns.. I guess they are just another company now.

I guess it's a melancholic reality that only certain outstanding individuals can be relied on to produce greatness. Most of us are just not there.

Another such example is Python. Python is slowly being bloated by the people in charge, since Guido basically gave up, soon to be as shitty as C++ is.

I am afraid Blender and Pytorch will be next, seeing how the original visionaries have left or will leave in the not so distant future.

Cool, if they ever fix the broken external monitor support, then I can see the ads on my second monitor too!!

Jobs was a dick, but so were many visionaries. See: Torvalds, Gates, Kildall. All with some dickishness, to varying degrees.

We need people willing to say "fuck you" to bullshit. Otherwise, the boards take over and focus on anything that brings them an extra few bucks.

Enshittification is real, and we need people willing to fight back against it.

This 'red line' was quite apparent around 10.14 when macOS and iOS were set on the collision course we see today in Ta-hoe. So much wasted visual space in the last 5 releases, making room for touch.

I doubt we'll see a pseudo macOS mode on mobileOS, but the mirroring for iOS in the last 2 major releases of macOS is just a jump to the left of local emulation.

To be fair, ads on a map aren't the same as Windows 11 start menu ads – the former are useful and contextual.

I feel the story being told would be more equivalent to what Microsoft is doing rather than Google.

That said, advertising is like a virus, and every company and product is eventually infected by it. It's too tempting to not monetize your customer's eyeballs once you have enough of them.

I thought Jobs' red lines went out of the window as far back as the Apple Pencil (iPhone presentation 2007: "Stylus? Yuck!").

I’ve been an Apple fan for as long as I can remember. I didn’t worship Jobs but he had complete control of Apple when he returned and molded the company in his vision. The company lacks that vision. Vision Pro is an example of that failure. Luckily for them iPhone and Mac will continue to dominate. They are here for another decade plus and once the AI bubble passes and we settle on clear winners, Apple will pounce on that opportunity. Am I heartbroken that they’re not the trailblazers? Outsiders? Hipsters? Yes. The brand has gone from Ferrari to Toyota. That’s quite literally the most perfect analogy.

Look at the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad. It’s constantly nudging you to subscribe to some Apple service, like AppleCare, or to pay for more iCloud storage because your measly 5 GB is running out. If Tim Cook is this shameless, then ads in Maps are practically old-school Apple by comparison.

I haven't had an iPhone in 15 years, but have been considering going back for my next phone as mine is over 5 years old. I had no idea it had gotten this bad though. What a pile of garbage. Ads in the map app?

It's not just Apple that's suffering, but every other company. Since Job's death, the entire tech industry lost its visionary. Apple used to be the company that set the high standard for others but now they don't think differently from any other.

THIS! Ads, misusing notifications (thank LinkedIn for that idea), Tahoe's self-indulgent UI, changes for no reason than some new designer has an idea, getting things ready for spatial, the stupid dispute with Nvidia...

Apple has a ruthless competitive upper echelon that gets rewarded on metrics that prioritize market hits and revenue increases. Get ready for more of this.

Obligatory I've been using Macs since the SE comment but I know Apple gives 2 damns about that.

I don't know... ads in maps is very, very different from ads in the OS.

Users buy the OS with the computer, and Apple doesn't incur any extra cost from users using it (maybe cloud-based AI will change this though?), and it doesn't require additional payments. Meanwhile, services like iCloud+ do require payment.

Maps is a service, like iCloud, but users have been trained to expect it for free, with basically every other maps provider using ads to fund it. I suspect that most users think that ads are a better user experience than not using it at all because they won't pay $9.99/month for maps.

Maps is also a search engine, and ads are the primary way to fund search engines. I guarantee that if Apple every launches iSearch they will eventually fund it with ads.

Apple has already cross a red line, it stepped over to one that has little interest in user experience. Recent releases of MacOS and iOS and iPadOS have given rise to Windowsesque complexity and ugliness. I have used Macs since the Classic, and am sad to say I no longer ascribe to the cult of Apple.

Whenever someone says, "oh Steve Jobs would have done / would never have done X", I always remember the scene in Silicon Valley where Laurie says "Monica, Peter Gregory is dead"[1].

Steve Jobs has been gone for a long time. Other people have taken his place, and Apple has been very successful since. While Jobs might have been very successful in his vision, a lot of things have changed since then, and it's very reasonable that the current apple execs might not align with what his philosophy was at the time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2-rGVw44A

TL;DR: Steve Jobs shut down efforts to incorporate advertising in Apple's software, because it would enshittify[a] the customer experience.

Everyone here on HN likely agrees that he was right never to cross that red line.

The path from "great user experience" to "enshittified user experience" consists of crossing such red lines, one after the other, for short-term profit.

---

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

I'm actually an apple convert, and I'm going back with my next new laptop purchase. About 8 years ago I got my first macbook at my first tech job and really loved what I was able to do with it as, essentially, a really fancy linux UI. Now it's a bloated linux UI that disrupts my ability to get work done, so I'm switching to a machine and OS that respect me.

If I see ads in their proprietary software, I’m done as a customer.

Steve Jobs created iAd

There have been ads in Apple News for years now. There were not, at its outset.

And I hate them.

Yes. Steve would take a giant dump all over this nonsense.

Apple is increasingly at risk of similar enshittification as Google.

Ads should be illegal.

One word: Enshittification.

Uhm, is crossing?? Mate, you're going to have to reverse direction and travel back about eight years to find that line.

I feel like most of this is Microsoft's fault. As MS lowers the bar for what's acceptable on Windows, Apple just has to be somewhat-obviously better.

Additionally, Google's ad-driven economy set a low bar with Android, but that platform has always been that way. Together, those platforms make it really easy for Apple to posture as being considerate.

Decent short article built around a personal anecdote with SJ. The AI slop image of SJ at the top was such a turn off it was hard for me to respect anything this fellow had to say. It's a real shame that people feel the need to include images like that, presumably to draw attention on social media embeds, but it's just gross seeing death porn like that.

Apple Maps has always had subtle ads. They show various stores and shops at different zoom levels in your town, some requiring very high zoom levels meaning you wouldn’t stumble across them.

>It didn’t matter that customers would be free to choose a version with or without ads. He didn’t want any user to see the OS polluted in this way.

Another subtle but distinct user experience cost of this would be that every user is given the option to choose between one option or the other, and that is already part of the user experience, and it has a cost.

It's similar to the idea that more options are not better, you can't just keep adding more settings and levers and pulleys knobs on the task bar and the settings and the profile and the customization tab and the control panel, and the privacy center, etc...

Each choice has a UX cost. Even if it's technically outside of the software and it occurs at the shop. The product line is the first part of the experience, will you choose a product? a product XL? A product XL Pro?

Everything breaks.

Jobs, if lived, will bow to ads or get fired.

Local businesses with better quality usually have better ratings in maps and better economics—higher margins, repeat customers, lower acquisition costs. And since only nearby places can compete, you get real competition on merit instead of a race to the bottom with faceless actors. Good ads solve a real problem: helping people discover great spots in unfamiliar cities.

Jobs saw something with iAd.

The problem is simple auction mechanics favor whoever has the deepest pockets. A mediocre chain with fat margins outbids an amazing local place, even if the local spot delivers way more value. You’re optimizing for who can pay, not who’s actually good.

To fix this, you weight bids by quality signals like ratings, time spent and repeat visits.

Now ads amplify what’s already great instead of just selling visibility.

Users get better recommendations, good businesses win, and Apple builds trust. That’s how you turn ads from a tax on attention into actual product value—and an improved user experience.

> What would Steve Jobs do?

> ... I was in the room when Steve was presented with an eerily similar “opportunity.” ... 1999-ish ... Lee Clow and I were invited to a hastily scheduled meeting with Steve and his top lieutenants. The topic was building advertising into the Mac system software. ...

Not that I like ads, but - Late 90's Apple, fresh out of a near-death experience, is an extremely different context from today's Apple, with it's 12-digit annual profits and #4 spot on the Fortune 500 list.

Am I the only one that remembers Steve introducing the iAd platform?

[dead]

But don't you find it convenient to be connected with products you might like based on your preferences? /s

VC-brained morons are literally incapable of not ruining the companies and products they get their hands on. I've been a soft proponent of a global ban on ads for as long as I can remember, and I've only become more convinced over the years that it is something we need to agree on and start enforcing as a society.

Ads are evil, the whole incentive structure is fucked, the "free" products are brainrot trash. It is time to cut off the limb before the infection spreads.

[dead]

Click bait headline. Is that a real photo of SJ? Flagged and moving on.

It doesn't matter what Steve Jobs would or wouldn't do, Tim Cook took Apple to a $3T company and that's where we are.

Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.

The ending of the article is such a low quality..

> Whatever his reason, Tim Cook is not as protective of the user experience as his predecessor was. If we were to ask Tim why it’s okay to bring ads into Apple products now, but wasn’t okay during Steve’s reign, the best (only?) answer would probably be, “Today’s Apple is very different from Steve’s Apple.”

> Quite true. And that is exactly the problem.

So Ken Segall first admits he doesn't know the reason, then speculates the answer Tim Cook would give if they were asked the question, then ends the article by contemplating on that speculative answer.

And the thumbnail is quite obviously AI generated. Just low quality all around. The point could be driven home without resorting to either of these two things.