Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.

And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original email for the purchase and click the link in there.

The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading.

The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.

Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine. However, you have to question if that’s what most people who use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don’t necessarily have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad supported free music streaming services if they never pay for music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.

Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.

I haven’t used Apple devices back when they were good so I have always avoided all the built-in Apple bloat/adware.

Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software.

It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.

>> 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.

I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26 they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music from iTunes Store.

An iPhone is a vending machine in your pocket.

(owned and operated by Apple, and __you__ paid for it.)

  I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.

I have to rant about search in the App Store.

Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.

Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted links but they're not as prominent.

The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite literally half the screen.

I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.

Yeah for me it has been degrading ever since the Settings app became an upsell app. I'm sorry I came here to change a setting not dismiss a notification on your latest failed service thing that requires 20,- a month.

> I do care about apple forgetting that the walled garden’s walls are tolerated only because the experience inside is better.

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?

They don't put MacOS on iPad because they want MacOS to slowly die and make App Store the only way to install software. This has nothing to do with cannibalizing Mac.

> They focus now a lot on growing revenue

Explain like I'm five, how does a multi trillion dollar company expect to keep growing revenue forever? Are they planning to keep enshittifying user experience until revenue dives?

Maybe they should stop focussing on 'growing'. Isn't nearly $100bn in profit per year enough??

> "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill

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.

Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.

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.

Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.

Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it.

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.

Ads in the App Store continue to be a bad customer experience as well.

> I think Steve would have changed with the times too

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.)

The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope they abstain. But it’s really not too offensive in my opinion.

I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point.

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.

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

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.

I have no doubt that the team behind Liquid Glass had the same noble motivations as the team behind Microsoft's Metro Design Language in 2010.

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.

I am running the latest iOS 26.1 and it's still very buggy. The most annoying one is that anytime I either restart my phone or update the phone (which restarts it), the wallpaper changes to all black.

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

Iphone user here. I have to admit that the IOS UI/UX has become really tiring and at times I'm utterly confused by inconsistency, a total contrast from the early days IOS when everything was consistent and intuitive. The silver lining is that I am using my Iphone less and less.

It isn't obvious to you that it's AI? You had to look it up? Please get more familiar with actual photographs, maybe skim a few AI free photo sites or, oh, I don't know, buy a few coffee table photo books and develop some discernment, because that one is about as obvious a fake photo as a stick figure would be. It's truly gross.

Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous person doing something he never did.

it's super distasteful, i thought, having seen steve jobs in person face to face

It sure looks it. It was my assumption the moment I saw it.

Yeah especially since it probably wouldn't take long to scrub through some WWDC presentations of his to find him holding up his hands like that (or a gesture of comparable meaning)

There's something way off about that image, I'd bet money it's AI. Gross.

It's death porn gross AI slop, 100% and immediately obvious to anyone who isn't coming of age in the slop era.

Yes. Pretty hypocritical for an article about "crossing red lines" to use AI slop for an image of a real person. Very disrespectful.