Comment by al_borland
10 hours ago
I’m curious Ternus’ views on services and the heavy hand Cook has had with them. I’d like to see Apple chill out a bit. Have them, but stop pestering users with in-OS ads and notifications to sign up. It’s been very off putting and cheapens the platform.
I hope they sell a higher priced monthly Apple One bundle which allows people to pay extra to not see ads in Apple Maps. Can even make it multiple tiers for no ads in Apple TV and Apple Maps, or maybe privacy plus tiers so they can earn more money by not selling search history.
Personally, I hope the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps comes bundled with the fact that I purchased an iPhone. A lack of ads is a selling point.
My comment was tongue in cheek. They are already here:
https://ads.apple.com/maps
Which means the only other option is to hopefully be able to pay Apple even more to not have to see ads. Maybe buy more Apple shares to share in this "advancement".
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Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
It's remarkably annoying, as a business, to keep your Apple Maps data up to date. But, thankfully, they seem to have ended their partnership with Yelp.
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They should charge for it.
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.
YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.
Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.
The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).
Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.
They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:
- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).
- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.
- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.