Comment by bitpush
7 hours ago
How so? This smells like Apple Distortion Field. "Yeah our ads are better. Its the other guys' ads that are bad".
The problem with Apple is they make statements that they walk back gleefully at a moments notice.
- Nobody wants a bigger phone - iPhone Pro Maxes
- Nobody wants foldables - iPhone Duo
- We've simplified the product portfolio .. ahem.
- AI is bad - Ours is called Apple Intelligence. Totally different thing.
Think Different indeed.
When iAd launched, it was a $1 million minimum spend just to get onto the platform, they wanted large corporate “lifestyle” brands, Apple exerted creative control over how ads were designed so they could enforce a bunch of user experience guardrails & marketers had no means of independently verifying campaign performance themselves. Their only source was whatever Apple told them. It did not do well. A few years later they tried to salvage it by dropping the minimum spend to $50, removing themselves from the process & making it closer to Google’s AdMob—or approximately as much as Apple was able to early last decade—but it was too little too late. They dropped it by 2016.
When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.
Extreme innovation
Well, and dozens of other innovations every other company copied, conveniently ignored.
From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI, to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on, to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta, to the first modern touch smartphone, 1 full year before Android came out (and which made Android change its beta design to copy the way iOS worked), to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right, to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip. Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
Modern "services+ads" Apple sucks to the point that I'm moving away, but to say they didn't innovate is laughable.
I don't want to really downplay Apple but there's much better innovation examples that what you listed. One of Apple's great advantages is that it owns the hardware, unlike Linux or Windows. Those have to work in highly heterogeneous environments. I mean Linux runs on everything from a literal potato to a super computer and everything in between.
To highlight Apple's innovation maybe mention things like the iPhone or iPod. They weren't the first devices of their kind but Apple's magic was always the mixture of the two Steves. Technical but stylish. But modern Apple isn't the same. The magic is gone
A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with...
> From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI
Ignored because nobody cares or wanted it.
> to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on
Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
> to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta
That's a remarkable engineering achievement but that's an implementation detail. Backwards compatibility on the desktop was and still is tablesakes.
> to the first modern touch smartphone
Nobody forgot, there's always one of you to remind the class that Apple was first (by your own definition of modern touch smartphone)
> to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right
They were clearly the first to demonstrate that people did indeed want fully wireless despite HN's objections at the time.
> to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip
That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
> Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
I don't know anyone who claims otherwise, and for the longest time they didn't make their own touchpads. So much for being conveniently forgotten.
What a bad-faith comment. You just wanted to launch into an anti-Apple lecture and it doesn’t sound like you have the slightest clue about this specific topic. Have you watched the iAds presentation? They’re not like any other advertisements I’ve seen before. CERTAINLY not at the time. You can see exactly why advertisers didn’t bite.
Honest question. If iAds were so good, why didnt it succeed?
When something is successful its all Apple. When something fails, its just that others dont get it.
Do you afford the same benefit to other people/companies? Why is Apple so special?