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lambdasquirrel parent
Yeah this is not what I pay the Apple premium for.
mrguyorama
Do you not remember the time they force downloaded a U2 album to everyone's phone?

What do you pay the apple tax for?

wkat4242
That U2 album still screws me today. I have two homepods and often they misunderstand me and think I'm asking them to play a song. I hate it when they play music. So I tried to delete all my music from my Apple account. Ok. But this U2 album keeps coming back no matter what I try. And I don't even like U2 :(
nojs
Yeah, it’s basically the “I accidentally bumped my ear buds” track
mingus88
Serious answers?

Vertical integration of hardware/firmware/OS/Software/services from a big tech firm that isn’t making their margins from selling my personal data and actually delivers industry leading privacy features

Pushing ads through the Wallet is pretty gauche though. Nobody’s perfect

bigyabai
Vertical integration I can understand. Give a man money, and he'll pay for convenience. But this?

> actually delivers industry leading privacy features

You can't prove that to save your life. You can hope that Apple delivers industry-leading privacy features... but there is no iOS Open Source Project for you to audit. Apple sues security researchers, the most cutting-edge iOS vulnerability engineers make six figures working for NSO Group. You aren't trusted with an open bootloader to try using other phone ROMs, not that anything would stop it from working. You aren't given a way to roll back updates if Apple makes a controversial change to their security model. Apple won't even give you alternatives to features they admit are backdoored[0].

It's entirely a system of trust. If you don't trust Apple unconditionally, the magic of their products starts to collapse. It's not a new trend either, people in this thread are right to call back to the "gracious" free U2 album. Or further back to the coinage of "Reality Distortion Field" itself.

> Nobody’s perfect

You say that like there's no way to fix this. As though you live in an alternate reality where it's somehow impossible to write software that respects the user, or legislate guidelines that enforces fair competition.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

mingus88
Read up on private compute cloud, the transparency log and published binaries, the VRE, use of oHTTP proxies …

And then come back and tell me that there is anyone else going through such hoops (at not charge) to make sure they know nothing about you and you don’t need to trust them for the system to work

bigyabai
Gladly. There are cheaper products from competing companies going through more hoops to make sure you have cellular privacy and don't need to trust the OEM for the system to work.

Whitepapers are whitepapers. Apple had Push Notification whitepapers that insisted the data was private, look how that turned out. I don't care about their third-party auditors, I want transparency and I don't care who calls me crazy for it.

latexr
> Apple had Push Notification whitepapers that insisted the data was private, look how that turned out.

How did it turn out? Could you expand on or link to what you’re talking about?

TiredOfLife
Apple settings have been littered with ads for years.
monero-xmr
Have you tried to use Windows lately? I have one for a media PC. It's so insanely terrible, the ads, the popups, the nags, the dark patterns. Microsoft has given up on personal desktops, just milking the elderly with scams. Terrible
paxys
What does that have to do with Apple?
idle_zealot
More just the state of the world. Apple doesn't need to be squeaky clean to justify a premium price tag. It only needs to be better enough that discerning customers pick it over the outrageously awful alternatives. Market forces at work, racing to the bottom of tolerability.
fsflover
Did you maybe hear about the third option, apart from the duopoly?
idle_zealot
For a variety of reasons that I confess to not understanding, Linux doesn't seem to be an acceptable alternative for most people. I'm very glad it exists for my own use, though.
cosmicgadget
Well considering the article is about a mobile device...
2 More Comments →
mgh2
The benefits outweigh the costs for them, not for Apple though: slightly related - https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=44369227
tw600040
//Have you tried to use Windows lately?

I haven't. When I read that I was wondering if you were going to say it got better and is good now or something. Oh well. Good to know. Thanks for the info.

latexr
The fact that another companies does it worse in no way excuses that Apple does it at all.
animatethrow
You can quickly disable all the Windows start menu ads using either gpedit.msc or regedit. On Linux Ubuntu there's a least one Ubuntu Pro terminal ad I remember having to disable, so no OS is immune from this. As a long time user of Linux, Mac, and Windows, Windows involves the fewest time concerning hassles to tweak a system to be perfectly comfortable and distraction free. With Linux I have spent way too much time solving hardware issues like a laptop not waking from sleep or a bluetooth device freezing Gnome or NVidia drivers not playing nice with Wayland, etc. Linux has been way too slow to support HDR monitor output for YouTube. Mac has way too many issues with third party hardware. If you use a non-Apple mouse with a Macbook the scroll wheel direction will be wrong until you research and install a third party scroll reverser utility. I also remember having a lot of trouble figuring out what third party software I had to install to disable mouse acceleration on the Mac (Steelseries Exactmouse was one older solution). Last I used a Mac the Night Shift feature didn't work with non-Apple monitors so I had to research and install the third party Flux solution, but I recall that had some bugs and its own privacy concerns.... Meanwhile, Windows works great with all my non-Microsoft hardware because that's the nature of its open ecosystem. Windows 11 now also does proper desktop color management like the Mac has had for ages.
Gud
During my almost 25 years of usage of FreeBSD I don’t recall one instance of this happening. Same for OpenBSD.

So it would appear some operating systems are in fact immune to this.

animatethrow
Yes, I concede these niche operating systems won't show me ads. But can I play an HDR YouTube video in a web browser on my HDR display using FreeBSD or OpenBSD? No. One can't even do this with Linux yet as far as I know, though Firefox on Linux recently in the past few months now has experimental HDR support (haven't tried it yet).
Gud
Did you try yt-dlp?
wkat4242
> You can quickly disable all the Windows start menu ads using either gpedit.msc or regedit.

Yes, we can. The other 99% of users can't, it sounds like Chinese to them.

yjftsjthsd-h
> On Linux Ubuntu there's a least one Ubuntu Pro terminal ad I remember having to disable, so no OS is immune from this.

Debian is a thing. Perhaps no commercial OS?

pabs3
Debian still has ads in Firefox like everyone else, and also privacy issues of various kinds and severities.

https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues

animatethrow
I can disable the Ubuntu terminal ad in seconds, whereas the last time I tried to install Debian I gave up after several hours of dealing with getting the correct proprietary firmware blobs, etc., that the Ubuntu installer mostly handles for me. But ultimately Ubuntu doesn't have as effortless of desktop hardware support for gaming laptops/PCs as Windows does.
yjftsjthsd-h
I am willing to entertain the possibility that commercial OSs have advantages. But the claim was "no OS is immune from this", while only pointing at a specific subset of OSs to support that claim and ignoring a wide selection of options that very much do appear immune to ads infesting the experience.

Also, you must not have tried Debian very recently, since as of https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/10/msg00... it also includes firmware by default.

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