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- Hacker News
- My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
by bm3719 - It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation requires more growth, and they're out of good ideas.
- Yep, after being a huge Apple Maps advocate for years to family and friends, I have quit it completely after I got a pop up introducing new ads.
Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.
If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…
by californical - Whenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them.
They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.
[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html
[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck
by kstrauser - My daughter recently left me with her old M1 Macbook Air when she went to college. I decided to give Fedora Asahi Remix a try. It was great seeing that the install process was a simple "pipe curl to sh" from a domain I suppose I have to trust anyway. The most technical part of the install was making sure I waited long enough for the machine to shut down and then holding the power button until "Loading startup options…” appeared on the screen, popping in my local macOS username/password a handful of times along the way while the scripts did their thing.
To be fair, I did in fact get a "Donate to GNOME" interstitial shortly after I first logged in. My agent was able to disable that without too much trouble. I find it obnoxious that GNOME gets to grab my attention for a donation just because they control my UI, while the thousands of other developers who wrote key parts of my OS don't get the same privilege.
That aside, I'm absolutely thrilled with the combination of Apple hardware and Linux software. I can see this being my default "mobile device with a keyboard." It doesn't yet work with my external display, but rumor has it the folks at Asahi having been making strides on that this year. Until then my Framework and Thinkpad both have some more utility as workhorse machines.
I suppose M2 is the most recent platform that has "good enough" Linux support from Asahi, but my M1 fits the bill for most everything I want to do on a mobile device with an attached keyboard. I might pick up an M3 with 24GB to replace it at some point if the Asahi team can get external monitors, GPU acceleration, and sleep working well on that chip.
by steelframe - I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
by fedeb95 - Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.by kqp
- I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...
by AnonC