I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.
Which is why the fitness and (for the apple watch ultra) more extreme and expensive sports like mountain climbing and diving are featured. You get the luxury class of people without looking out of touch with the premium class of people.
The people running subscription services within Apple may be measured on metrics (subscriber count/growth) that may not be aligned with the long-term interests of the company as a whole, especially since brand value and the effect of software advertising on hardware sales are hard to quantify.
I think for luxury brands advertising is even more important. Because they need to justify the inflated value of their brand.
Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.
Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.
True. But that’s advertising the product, not advertising in the product. It’s the latter that’s happening here. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands on a Ferrari, starting it up, and … finding an ad on the touch screen.
Apple enlisted Hermes to try and convince watch people that they understand luxury. The leather wrist strap costs as much as a new Apple Watch. As another noted here, premium vs luxury can be quite a step.
If it was random products, it might devalue the brand(or at least the app itself), but its clearly just advertising a more powerful product from apple for doing something similar, if you can't do what you want with the given app.
Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...
They make great hardware. They used to make great devices - but a great device needs the whole user experience to be great. Ad-ridden UI does not make for a great device. Doesn’t matter if it’s first or 3rd party ads.
It’s a great shame. Apple used to be the design standard to aspire to. Now it seems to have embraced enshitification. All because the market needs that share price to keep growing. And lacking leadership good enough to find another way.
They are in business to make money. Brand value and quality are far more nebulous as indicators of value than, say, "We got Brand X to pay us $Y for an ad campaign that will sit in Keynote for the next Z days and will book that revenue on the quarterly results".
The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.
Maybe unpopular take but ... this isn't just any ad. It's a link to another related product in the ecosystem. Discoverability has always been difficult and there are so many features that remain largely unknown to users because of it.
The title makes it seem like I can purchase an ad and have some kind of ill-fitting content jumping around the screen, trying really hard for my attention. Instead I see an upgrade path from what is free and widely available to a potentially better product. I see this with open source projects too.
It's still an ad though. It's just a context-targeted ad: You get it because you use this product and they want to upsell you. That you might want the product doesn't make it less of an ad. On the contrary. Discoverability is one the purposes of ads. Increasing perceived value is another one but not the only one.
It's the line of thinking that companies like Google tend to push. "All our tracking gives you ads for products you are more likely to want!". Well, yeah. Because those ads are more likely to convert to a sale they are more insidious in my view.
I always like it when I see ads for things that I absolutely do not want because it means they haven't figured me out properly. The few times I watch Amazon prime I tend to get car ads, and I hate cars, I'm never going to buy one. Or dodgy gambling website ones, I don't gamble at all, not even a lottery ticket. It means they don't know what I really want and the ad doesn't really put mental pressure on me to part with my money because it's irrelevant.
The title makes it seem like Keynote is showing ads in the UI, and from the screenshot I see a button that if I press it, will accept my credit card so I can buy a thing.
Just because it's hard to discover things I don't yet own doesn't mean I want them shown to me while I'm making a slideshow.
Pretty sure most people commenting here didn't even look at the post to see it's Apple promoting their own related product to their customers, not a third-party ad
Ads are Ads, people hate to see them whatever they are advertising. Especially when they already paid a lot of money to join the ecosystem, upselling to paid customers feels cheap.
Yes they could, they would, and you know it. They'd be serving you malware, they'd look even worse, they'd be for scams, they'd sell all the data they harvest from you to 1000 other companies, etc.
I don't think they can. People expect third-party apps to sell them stuff, but not their OEM.
Apple used to differentiate themselves by not using their OEM apps for ad space. Now they're copying the exact same "curated" promotions style that made Windows packin apps intolerable.
I think the sibling poster was probably correct. I have the pro version, and somebody mentioned the ads are in the home version which would make sense.
I said I never denied they were there, I just cant see them in my copy so its wrong to call them ubiquitous in Windows.
This is all very bad timing. Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks, it is the wrong time for proprietary software providers to start pissing off and exploiting all their users.
I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
> Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks
No you can't. Someone can certainly burn a gorillion tokens to make a 3rd rate clone of Adobe suite that get's posted to HN as pre-alpha that fuels 1000 comments like this though.
I wonder how long will it be until people use ai to start reverse engineering all Apples APIs and protocols so that they can make 3rd party open source apps which can use the fruity ecosystem from outside the wall.
> I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
If you work at OpenAI, congrats on getting people to subscribe in the first place. The marketing is working, OpenAI customers think they're safe from ads!
Another new annoyance: the Settings app has 2 red notification icons because Apple is trying to sell me extended AppleCare. Apparently no way to turn off these notifications.
It's been doing this for years now to try to get me sign into iCloud. I finally gave up and signed into the free version, then disabled every single service.
Apple has always been ultra-narcissistic, pushing designs and features that make their designers feel smart but actively hurt customers and decrease the utility of their products. Now they're even losing that. They ran out of good ideas shortly after Jobs died. Now they've run out of bad ideas and they're speed-running enshittification.
Apple has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Why do they want to associate it with this tasteless nickel-and-diming? If nothing else, surely this is bad for business over the long term. Gain a few low-value subscriptions, lose a few high-value hardware purchases.
they've been showing ads for years. literally every year i get an ad for the new version of the os. heck sometimes they show popups advertising security updates. apple has no shame.
Yeah same here. I decided to use 5/6 year old trash PCs running Debian. They work absolutely fine. I think I’m actually more productive and certainly less distracted and less broke.
My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.
It's ever so slightly disingenuous to call this "showing ads": It appears to be letting you know about a paid DLC for the app you are running not "this space is for sale".
That said, I don't think it's even a slippery slope from here to "this space for sale".
I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.
They're a premium brand, not a luxury brand. That's an important distinction.
Dell, HP, etc. all have premium products as well as their economy ones. Apple just doesn't do cheap and economy products.
When that gold plated Apple Watch came out, you could feel the discomfort. That's luxury brand territory.
Even the most expensive Apple Watch isn't in that "luxury" category anymore.
Which is why the fitness and (for the apple watch ultra) more extreme and expensive sports like mountain climbing and diving are featured. You get the luxury class of people without looking out of touch with the premium class of people.
Somebody listened to the Acquired episode on LVMH!
The people running subscription services within Apple may be measured on metrics (subscriber count/growth) that may not be aligned with the long-term interests of the company as a whole, especially since brand value and the effect of software advertising on hardware sales are hard to quantify.
I think for luxury brands advertising is even more important. Because they need to justify the inflated value of their brand.
Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.
Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.
True. But that’s advertising the product, not advertising in the product. It’s the latter that’s happening here. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands on a Ferrari, starting it up, and … finding an ad on the touch screen.
maybe I’m just jaded at this point but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ferrari did have pop up ads on the screens in their cars
Apple enlisted Hermes to try and convince watch people that they understand luxury. The leather wrist strap costs as much as a new Apple Watch. As another noted here, premium vs luxury can be quite a step.
> They’re a luxury goods brand
How so? Just about any major manufacturer has hardware in the same price range.
If it was random products, it might devalue the brand(or at least the app itself), but its clearly just advertising a more powerful product from apple for doing something similar, if you can't do what you want with the given app.
Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...
>They’re a luxury goods brand,
Or maybe they aren't. They make great devices. I use them. I don't think of them as a luxury though.
Even if they’re not:
> They make great devices
They make great hardware. They used to make great devices - but a great device needs the whole user experience to be great. Ad-ridden UI does not make for a great device. Doesn’t matter if it’s first or 3rd party ads.
It’s a great shame. Apple used to be the design standard to aspire to. Now it seems to have embraced enshitification. All because the market needs that share price to keep growing. And lacking leadership good enough to find another way.
They are in business to make money. Brand value and quality are far more nebulous as indicators of value than, say, "We got Brand X to pay us $Y for an ad campaign that will sit in Keynote for the next Z days and will book that revenue on the quarterly results".
The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.
Customers' desires are a nuisance, but if you ignore them long enough they go away.
My iPhone showed me an ad for apple pay (the nfc radio, not the credit card), which I regularly use.
Today, I started carrying cash, and switched back to using the NFC chips in my credit cards.
My iPhone 13 mini will probably be my last iOS device. Tap to pay was hard to setup in grapheneos the last time I checked.
I guess I won’t miss it after all.
Just tape your CC to the back of your phone, and your muscle memory will work the same.
It's hard for my eyes to look away from that liquid glass toolbar train wreck to even see the ad.
Maybe unpopular take but ... this isn't just any ad. It's a link to another related product in the ecosystem. Discoverability has always been difficult and there are so many features that remain largely unknown to users because of it.
The title makes it seem like I can purchase an ad and have some kind of ill-fitting content jumping around the screen, trying really hard for my attention. Instead I see an upgrade path from what is free and widely available to a potentially better product. I see this with open source projects too.
It's still an ad though. It's just a context-targeted ad: You get it because you use this product and they want to upsell you. That you might want the product doesn't make it less of an ad. On the contrary. Discoverability is one the purposes of ads. Increasing perceived value is another one but not the only one.
It's the line of thinking that companies like Google tend to push. "All our tracking gives you ads for products you are more likely to want!". Well, yeah. Because those ads are more likely to convert to a sale they are more insidious in my view.
I always like it when I see ads for things that I absolutely do not want because it means they haven't figured me out properly. The few times I watch Amazon prime I tend to get car ads, and I hate cars, I'm never going to buy one. Or dodgy gambling website ones, I don't gamble at all, not even a lottery ticket. It means they don't know what I really want and the ad doesn't really put mental pressure on me to part with my money because it's irrelevant.
The title makes it seem like Keynote is showing ads in the UI, and from the screenshot I see a button that if I press it, will accept my credit card so I can buy a thing.
Just because it's hard to discover things I don't yet own doesn't mean I want them shown to me while I'm making a slideshow.
Objectively, this isn’t much different from an app offering in-app purchases.
Subjectively, however it feels significantly different to me.
Reasons why that’s the case that I can think of are:
- it shows the offer even when users aren’t searching for the offered product?
- the product that is offered doesn’t signal “in-app purchase”?
- it doesn’t feel like Apple to do this in this way.
Also, I tried to reproduce this by updating to the latest Keynote and couldn't. Are we sure this is real and not just rage-bait?
Maybe you already own Creator Studio so there is no need to show it to you?
I just updated and see the same "ad" under New Document -> Choose a Theme.
Agree, not an ad. Title made it seem like the excessive ads we see in games or iphone apps.
The 8 word title?
It's not just related it's for getting the paid features of Keynote itself.
I have been exiting the Apple ecosystem for the last year. Feeling vindicated. It’s turning into the trash heap they were once proud not to be.
They are only ads when other apps do it, when apple does it they are "Enhanced UI Recommendations".
Pretty sure most people commenting here didn't even look at the post to see it's Apple promoting their own related product to their customers, not a third-party ad
Oh we’re well aware. There’s nothing cheaper than upsell nags when you spent what you did already.
How much did you pay for keynote?
So I can start saying that Apple's software is ad-supported now?
The price is in the hardware.
$1,999
An unwanted distraction is an unwanted distraction.
Ads are Ads, people hate to see them whatever they are advertising. Especially when they already paid a lot of money to join the ecosystem, upselling to paid customers feels cheap.
Nobody uses that to excuse Microsoft showing OneDrive ads.
Apple's own cross-promotions are so ugly and ham-fisted that I'm not sure third parties could do worse: https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-to-ditch-unsolicited-f1-ads-n...
Yes they could, they would, and you know it. They'd be serving you malware, they'd look even worse, they'd be for scams, they'd sell all the data they harvest from you to 1000 other companies, etc.
I don't think they can. People expect third-party apps to sell them stuff, but not their OEM.
Apple used to differentiate themselves by not using their OEM apps for ad space. Now they're copying the exact same "curated" promotions style that made Windows packin apps intolerable.
Yeh if we ignore all the reasons stated, they certainly can't I guess.
I looked, and I'm infuriated.
This is exactly the sort of thing that Apple avoided when it had strong management from Jobs. Now...
Does that make any difference at all? When Windows does it, people pop a fuse, but Apple gets a pass?
Pffffff..
Fanboys gonna fanboy; I'm reminded of the "switch to mac” parody animation by ubergeek from decades ago.
Apple is just as bad as Microsoft in this regard. They just won't leave their users alone.
You've got to be kidding? Microsoft has literal third party ads in the OS...
Really? I havent seen them. Not saying they dont exist, but they havent been shoved down my throat.
I think they are only in the "home" version, so if you're using a business version of Windows you won't see them
I am using pro, so you are probably correct.
They are literally in the start menu.
ok, but I cant see them. They arent in mine, so maybe they arent ubiquitous?
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-t...
why would you lie about such an easy to check fact?
I think the sibling poster was probably correct. I have the pro version, and somebody mentioned the ads are in the home version which would make sense.
I said I never denied they were there, I just cant see them in my copy so its wrong to call them ubiquitous in Windows.
I don't have them either. So maybe you are just incorrectly making a broad assumption about Windows devices.
i mean, both the article and my own experience with start menu ads on windows (which pushed me off the platform) seem to agree with me
This is all very bad timing. Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks, it is the wrong time for proprietary software providers to start pissing off and exploiting all their users.
I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
> Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks
No you can't. Someone can certainly burn a gorillion tokens to make a 3rd rate clone of Adobe suite that get's posted to HN as pre-alpha that fuels 1000 comments like this though.
That is what people can do right now, what will they be doing in 5-10 years.
I wonder how long will it be until people use ai to start reverse engineering all Apples APIs and protocols so that they can make 3rd party open source apps which can use the fruity ecosystem from outside the wall.
> I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
You could.
You very, very, very likely will not.
They know this and act accordingly.
Linux + thousands of developers with AI agents is going to show otherwise this next decade. I think. I hope?
Linux has millions of man-hours worth of code. Did it help Linux become a mainstream consumer platform?
> I could make a full macOS clone
With like a million bucks worth of tokens? Sure.
> Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.
I think you're missing a point here.
Thing is, only one person has to spend those tokens then the world gets its clone.
Last I checked, no ads in iA Presenter:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50090557
Just before they release their first smart home device with a screen.
I wonder whats coming?
Yeah someone made that point visually in the comments there too, quite aptly.
Prominent screen in the kitchen used as recipe stand showing ingredients etc.? The possibilities are endless, and I think we're going to love it.
Yes, we will own nothing and we will be happy
If you work at OpenAI, I want to let you know I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription today because you won't stop pestering me with upgrade offers/ads.
Go do that to your free users, not the ones paying your salary.
If you work at OpenAI, congrats on getting people to subscribe in the first place. The marketing is working, OpenAI customers think they're safe from ads!
Keynote showing an upsell for the premium version of Keynote is not an ad.
How is upselling not commercial promotion?
What do you think the selling part of upselling is referring to. It is for commercial promotion.
I remember seeing this back in January
Another new annoyance: the Settings app has 2 red notification icons because Apple is trying to sell me extended AppleCare. Apparently no way to turn off these notifications.
I thought you could click on it, press no/cancel, and it would disappear.
As of this morning, that does not work for me.
It's been doing this for years now to try to get me sign into iCloud. I finally gave up and signed into the free version, then disabled every single service.
ha there is one way
Apple published the instructions more than 40 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQRR-HC_G60
Don't like it? Vibe code your own Apple® Keynote® software.
No, the hot tip is to REA a patch to stop showing the ads, keep the rest.
From the title I imagined 3rd party ads, not an upsell for some feature of the app/platform.
Who tf uses keynote anyway lol
Apple has always been ultra-narcissistic, pushing designs and features that make their designers feel smart but actively hurt customers and decrease the utility of their products. Now they're even losing that. They ran out of good ideas shortly after Jobs died. Now they've run out of bad ideas and they're speed-running enshittification.
Are we too sensitive? It's their own product
Upselling your own paid customers is cheap. You already took their money, make them feel valued not like you just want to squeeze them for more.
No. Ad-hate is justified regardless of the product being sold or the platform presenting the ads.
Ads ruin everything.
I don’t like OneDrive ads from the same reason. They are still ads in a product that should be ads free.
If you also agree that people were too sensitive dragging Microsoft then yah, we are getting too sensitive
Ads are annoying whether it's for third party products or not.
I still use the old version of Keynote for this reason.
Apple has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Why do they want to associate it with this tasteless nickel-and-diming? If nothing else, surely this is bad for business over the long term. Gain a few low-value subscriptions, lose a few high-value hardware purchases.
they've been showing ads for years. literally every year i get an ad for the new version of the os. heck sometimes they show popups advertising security updates. apple has no shame.
Time to vibe code an OG Keynote clome...
Apple stopped caring about quality quite a few years ago but those decisions are only hitting us now. The next few years are going to be very stupid.
If we are lucky, Apple can right the ship in time. I wouldn't hold me my breath though.
I miss Steve Jobs.
Apparently I made the jump to Linux just in time. They are just your run-of-the-mill enshittifying Rent® Seeking© Optimizer™ now.
> now
Serivces have been a huge (and growing) chunk of their revenue for a long time
Yeah same here. I decided to use 5/6 year old trash PCs running Debian. They work absolutely fine. I think I’m actually more productive and certainly less distracted and less broke.
My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.
I’d like to switch to Linux, but I can't find a sufficiently functional alternative to Keynote, which I need every day for my work. It’s a shame.
Claude, make me a latex presentation on <topic> filled in with this outline.
If you don’t know what latex is, substitute “html”.
Similarly, the choice of LLM is unimportant.
Well, given that AI can now decompile and port software... :)
I still feel like iPhones are good devices, but yeah apple is going down hill.
I also get a lot of life out of MacBooks, they have been pretty reliable for me.
They stopped releasing phone sized devices 5 years ago.
Never forget.
It's ever so slightly disingenuous to call this "showing ads": It appears to be letting you know about a paid DLC for the app you are running not "this space is for sale".
That said, I don't think it's even a slippery slope from here to "this space for sale".
So, an ad for DLC is not an ad?