Comment by rapind
8 hours ago
Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.
Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.
I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).
> thermocline of trust
Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.
That applies to businesses with small moats.
Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.
Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…
it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
> lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
> they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
Yup. If the main differentiator is gone, you move to the next marginal thing that matters, which in this case is working as a map.
> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.
The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.
Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
The point was that the highest level of luxury does not advertise itself. If Apple wants to be seen as a luxury brand, which is something they spent decades building, they should not be pushing these ads so hard. Building that image took a long time, but it can all go away very quickly.
Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.
> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt
Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.
Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?
If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?
It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.
Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.
> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
The real question is why is the median Apple decision maker circa 2026 vastly more short term greedy than the median Apple decision maker circa 2012?
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I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
>which is even more bloated and ad infested.
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
Even better, Morphe can rip ads out of the native YouTube client :).
We need an open phone platform badly.
They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (for the Kindle it was $20 one-time).
For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.
Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?
I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.
I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.
I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.
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> seat heater subscription services going for BMW?
Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.
> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
Where would the luxury market go? Asking for a friend
GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...
https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...
Pantone and some sound partnership.
From what I've seen of GrapheneOS, it's not a luxury product, it's a product for tinkerers, who don't mind finicky granular configs. If I'm paying a premium, I expect sensible, privacy respecting, defaults that I can use out of the box. Not constant fumbles until everything is "setup".
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As someone who has daily driven both side by side as much as I love GOS, AOSP / Android absolutely does not feel premium compared to iOS. Both the UI and UX are rough compared to the polish of iOS. And the FOSS apps on Android are extremely subpar in terms of feel compared to iOS (off the top of my head look at how bad the Fossify Contacts app is compared to Google Contacts) but that’s the trade-off.
I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
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Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.
Likewise, no Android Auto
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In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.
You mean like when I clicked this article? What an ad filled mess of a website.
At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.
Where would they go? Android? That's even more spammy and ad ridden. They sure aren't installing grapheneOS.
Is BMW still doing the $20/mo for heated seats or whatever? All these companies man… not everything needs to be recurring revenue ffs.
That one gets a worse rep than I think it deserves.
You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.
It's bad because you already paid for the hardware, any additional charge is just a money grab.
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It is already built into the damn car. Everyone already paid for it.
Really? You think a luxury brand charging a subscription for heated seats, a basic add on, is inline (haha rip inline 6).
> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
> On the flip side
Pun intended?
Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!
Don't give 'em more ideas! :)
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?