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- Hacker News
- I did a DDG search for "apple advertising". The summary under the page link says:
> Reach customers where only Apple Ads can take you
ads.apple.com clearly promotes exclusive access to advertise to Apple users on Apple devices.
by user00005 - Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45258743by popey
- 2025 Apple is a perfect representation of 2025 America.by knivets
- The article is a bit disingenuous.
Steve’s main claim to fame was Apple 2.0 when he brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. He had almost no choice but to take radical bet-the-farm bets as the status quo was the company goes bankrupt.
Tim Cook inherited a company on an upward trajectory and kept it going. His core job was don’t $&@? it up, and at that he was very successful. Was Apple potentially less innovative during his tenure? Yeah probably, but it was stable and grew massively under his oversight, which was the job. Most shareholders that held their stock after Steve left are very happy with their returns since then.
by cmiles8 - I think I, and maybe even Jobs, would be more interested in whether phoneholders are happy with the phones they’re holding.
- 2025-09 would be helpful context for the article link
- Totally off topic. I think it's important to point out that this is the first planned CEO transition at Apple. Every other CEO was fired or died.by detourdog
- Jobs resigned six weeks before he died.by lucky_cloud
- you can blame Tim Cook for other things - but giving trump that useless statue - you can admire Tim Cook for his shrewdness & political capacity.
he knew he was facing an incompetent petty adversary. so instead of preserving his ego - he damaged his instead of damaging Apple itself. that's a martyr like sacrifice.
has Tim Cook put company profits over the customer - yes. but has Tim Cook preserved apple's value & position yes when it could have been severely damaged by trump, YES.
by dzonga - As someone who spent half their career at Apple, I can't even begin to tell you how ridiculous that sentiment is. You won't find Apple employees who agree with you. It was infinitely embarrassing to see Tim bend over for a fascist asshole. Apple is now in the "bowed to Trump" group.
I will be glad when the Tim Cook era is over for good.
by LatencyKills - It was shameful handing over the gold to the orange one.
Hopefully in 2 years every company that 'bended the knee' will excise the leadership that thought it was a good idea. Shows a lack of good judgement and understanding of the social order.
Your integrity as a leader has value. Squandering it to slow down some tariffs is foolish.
by budman1 - Oh yeah Jobs was such an anarchist who stuck it to the man.by thefz
- In Jobs's time, 2007-2011 there was still a lot of overall pushback against PRISM, and also from Apple. I remember reading that they reviewed and only ended up complying with 3 requests. It's not nothing, but Google and Microsoft were far more eager to offer up their data.by BearOso
- Bill Burr has the only reasonable take on Steve Jobs:
- Can you please summarize? I can't handle Burr's strident delivery for more than a few seconds.by endemic
- Is this the bit where he talks about Steve Jobs getting onto several states' organ-transplant registries (simultaneously) so he could eventually "cut the line," using trafficked Tennessee bodyparts, to get his replacement liver installed?
- So many things that could be said about this. For one -- I truly enjoyed the accidental repetition in the article that marked the effort as likely not aided too much by AI.
But I couldn't help, most of the way through it, to crystalize the respone, "How did we get the idea Tim Cook was chosen because he was likely to be much like Steve Jobs?" Honestly, having watched the Steve Jobs commencement address several times, I kept going back to his declaration that "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
by ezekiel68 - > I’m not an uncritical Steve Jobs fan. I know, from having worked closely with people who worked directly for Jobs for many years, that he could be a mercurial, and brutish, boss.
That's a pretty big euphemism for Steve Jobs being a piece of shit. What I've realized throughout the years of working is that being able to work as a team is almost more important than your technical capacity. You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
by kvuj - > You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
This sounds so self-gratifying. You could have also written: "I am better than Steve Jobs and I look down on him".
by devld - I grew up in a one-highschool Texas town, a notorious football powerhouse. The brainwashing we received as players was incredible, and we were definitely respected members of our community (e.g. newspaper would interview us; girls; getting away with murder).
The football t-shirts we were given for dailywear said something to the effect of "loved by few, feared by some, respected by ALL" – and I just can't help but feel this message was terrible advice for [our] young impressionable minds.
We probably deserved it, when playing more-modest football programs, when the opposing team changed their objective from scoring points to breaking our ankles (literally).
----
All to say, I have several brothers, two of whom are experts in their respective fields (engineering and law), with decades (each) of practice and expertise:
they come off immediately as know-it-all assholes (to most people; to me, occassionally) simply because their levels of expertise come with the sacrifice of social niceties (not always, but often).
[within their circles, however, they are respected as gods]
----
But to offer from their perspective (as a stupider brother of these two): most people my two "asshole" brothers deal with actually are quite stupid [relatively]; they are having to deal with us "morons" on an hourly basis [†]
Once you get past the outer asshole wrapper, these are the people that are driving our societies (for better or worse) "forwards" – do not forget this – they are assholes because they care so much about their work/goals [∑]
[†] remember the Carlin joke: think of the average person, and realize that half of people are dumber that that || to true geniuses (which I am not, but two brothers are) we are all "fucking idiots, most of the time" (to paraphrase their amalgamation)
[∑] e.g: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law> [tl;dr: half the work is performed by the sqrt(#people)]
- > What I've realized throughout the years of working is that being able to work as a team is almost more important than your technical capacity. You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
Is this a true realization though? Lots of people are very nice, but Jobs got a shit ton done that was truly remarkable.
by boxed - I spent 11 years at Apple and attended many meetings with SJ. It was amazing to see how quickly he could understand a problem while, at the same time, being brutally harsh about why it hadn't already been solved. No one but Steve would have been allowed to consistently act that way towards coworkers.
Steve showed a generation of CEOs that being an asshole was a viable strategy.
by LatencyKills - I've repeatedly said here on HN that Steve Jobs was king of the assholes and a huge piece of shit, and been soundly flamed for it. A vast amount of first hand anecdotes of him being an asshole exist and are likely not fabrications by the people reporting them. And yet people think he's some sort of god like figure because apple made cool products.by walrus01
- The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general. I'm a long time Apple user, and the idea that ads have any place in my computers is appalling, but now they're in Maps, and they're in the OS as non-dismissible upsells, and I mean, Windows is right over there, all of this is unnecessary strategy taxation on what Apple does well (hardware and software).by jfb
- If the linux community could focus and organize its efforts it could actually offer an alternative that would reapply pressure that the tech industry has been working hard to lift from itself through creeping encirclement and enclosure, i.e., the Enclosure Acts. People sometimes lament things like how the Europeans stole the land of the indigenous tribes in what would become America or throughout he colonialism in Europe, but what is often overlooked is that this process of taking public lands and giving them to private people was done to the indigenous Europeans long before America was even discovered and colonialism was even engaged in, starting in the 12th century in the UK for example.
What the tech companies have been doing to the internet since about the early aughts has been no different, they've been using the same kind of enclosure strategy to limit and parcel out and divide up the internet among the ruling psychopaths.
by tyrabound - Steve jobs was even more cut throat, he would have doubled the prices.
- Which ads are in the OS? Are these the Apple TV and similar, or are there even more?by jjice
- "Services" was probably the only place where Apple could grow. So Eddy Cue stepped up and delivered.
I think it sucks too.
by JKCalhoun - > by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general
I wouldn't care about the rents if they weren't in the form of ads being shoved in everywhere. The "2 ads in the first 3 results" of the App Store is a horror show.
by AlexandrB - What Apple is doing is really just a symptom of a malaise with the economy in general, that in the last 25 years the business model of everything that possibly can be pushed that way has changed to: Rent Seeking.
In the economics textbook sense of the word. You will own nothing and rent forever. You will not have control over your own data or devices. Having that control is a threat to someone's revenue model for getting you to pay for monthly subscriptions to things and services.
Microsoft's new user out of box experience for Windows 11 is also a fine example of this.
Imagine where we would be at right now if the Windows Phone had been a wild success and the Microsoft App Store on the Windows Phone was also a wild success. You think the fees and commissions charged and terms/conditions for app publishers would be much different?
by walrus01