Sad to see "services" as a headline on Apple's earnings beat. I'm sure it is gratifying for Tim Cook, but this is going to be the thing that brings on much harder regulation for Apple.
Setting up a new phone prompts you incessantly about Apple Wallet, iCloud, etc. and uses badges to make you think something is wrong until you begin the process for each (the badges go away if you cancel out of it).
Such things have only continued. They're adding new products and paid services at a slow but steady pace, and regularly sending me notifications to sign up for those services. When you "upgrade" the OS, you're confronted with a whole slew of opportunities to sign up for more services, with no way to just ignore these prompts. I don't blame them for doing this, but it's become increasingly grating, and turned me off of Apple in general.
Like a lot of companies, they're focused on growing their bottom line, and don't see how they're angering their locked-in customers.
yea those apple employees are so stupid they have no idea that nagging you constantly is annoying. no of course they just don’t care about other people including their customers.
although to be fair sociopathy is essentially just another form of stupidity
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by this?
It's all seamless and I rarely think about it. Yeah I could spend Apple prices for Apple gear and not get the cloud stuff but. Why?
Oh wow I remember when Microsoft did that! Wow that turned out badly for them, even if the Zune app had an amazing UI.
Same mistakes, different decade.
I do still have all my old itunes music in the Music app, so not sure if that's what you're complaining about.
OTOH both Music and iTunes can only handle a limited set of file types; neither can do anything with my huge library of flac files. Perhaps that's your complaint, which I agree with.
Plus, I can edit the metadata for tracks that come from Apple Music to my own tastes so I can tag that a song from the service is one version while my copy of it is a different version.
For me, Music is one of those things I hope Apple never "modernizes" because I feel like a lot of this nerd-level functionality would be lost in a major rewrite. It's certainly light years ahead of Spotify's truly pathetic "local files" function.
Apps like Ecoute are alternatives and better in some respects (better navigation IMO), but worse in others.
Music just doesn't sync well across my devices. Full stop. I can start playing something on my phone, select my Homepods as my speakers via Airplay, and it will play. But if I lock my phone and come back a few minutes later, it'll forget what is currently playing on my HomePods and make me "replace" the music. If I try to control it from my other devices it's the same story. More than once I've had it yell at me for trying to play music in more than one place at a time and try to get me to upgrade to a family plan. I'm single and live alone.
Siri also often misunderstands scene names. I just turned to one of the HomePods and said, "Hey Siri, activate 'Nightlights Only'" (a scene name). She said, "Good night." and did nothing. This happens no matter how well I enunciate (general American accent) or how many times I try.
In the process of messing with it just now to prove my point before sharing, Siri hit a snag and told me to go update my iCloud account in the home app, so I did and ran into the same problem as this user[0] did two years ago (disappearing password prompt). It's wild.
This is not the Apple that made iMessage and Messages in OS X the most seamless text messaging experience I've ever experienced before.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomePod/comments/jsw122/homepod_upd...
Edit: I had my iPhone’s wifi off. Apparently I had to be on the same network to resolve the iCloud issue. Why not mention that?
I have two HomePods setup in stereo mode configured to an Apple TV 4K, and I cannot reliably get it to tell me today’s date, start a timer, play a movie, and not even pause or resume the Apple TV 4K.
It is so bad, that recently, if you say “Hey Siri, resume”, the audio resumes playing from the Homepods, but the Apple TV 4K still displays the screensaver until you press play on the remote. I do not even understand how that bug works (and it is a new one, the software continuously gets worse).
Overall I agree though. The core products are still good, but I’m hard pressed to spend any more money on this until they improve Siri and Homekit. I know there’s a big UI refresh coming that is welcome, but it feels bigger than that.
I wonder if it has to do with my five HomeKit secure video cameras and the HomePods or Apple TV 4K acting as a hub. And the fact that my Apple TV 4K is not wired to network.
The fact that you can't click a band name to navigate to that band's list of albums when playing local media is perhaps the thing I hate most about iOS. The band name renders in the color of a link, but is non-interactive.
I think I might have ADHD and I like to minimise any visual distraction by removing everything I can, else it becomes overwhelming for me, just seeing that badge marker when going through something was enough to annoy me.
I really wish there was more customisation so you could turn all that crap off that you didn't need / use so it wasn't even through, there is just too much junk on these devices but it's there to serve Apple and not you as a user.
So dumb.
To be sure it is not the hardware company of the 20th Century any longer.
Or stop carrying about growth. There are plenty of well respected dividend investments, even in tech.
More importantly, services, or really software, can be very exciting too, no less than hardware. Apple isn’t a hardware company, they’re a company that integrate hardware and software into packages that users desire. Services are just the extension of device’s software.
There all just 'me too' products levelling the ego system.
Apple TV+ is an odd one for example, it's not needed, there are plenty of streaming services around and they all work fine on apple devices.
They have not tried to do anything interesting or exciting with there services, they've just attached them in the most basic way and watched the cash flow in.
Apple created what was pretty much the first real platform for selling music online with iTunes. You could call Apple Music a “me too” move, but they really pivoted an existing business that had been threatened with disruption.
These comments about services have me reconsidering this plan.
* Some of their services actually don't work better. Apple Music sucks so people still use Spotify. Which is one of the areas of growth for Apple since they have the ability to make Apple Music the best, they just haven't yet.
Apple has had plenty of time to get their shit together with music. The fact that they haven't after 15 years tells me that they don't want to.
That said, this could change on a whim…
The next 'watch' would be a relatively minor product. The watch is a fairly pointless niche device. It helps apple and it's another product in the eco system, but it doesn't move the needle that much.
Too bad Apple is still so, so very bad at this. Their services are barely functioning, at best, with multiple WTFs daily.
When they work, they are not even magic. They are the bare minimum of what you expect them to do (like, for example, to quickly and correctly sync photos between me and my family).
I believ it uses this patch https://github.com/dylanaraps/openbox-patched
What does services as a headline signify, why would it bring on regulation (and what kind of regulation), and why is that a bad thing?
The only thing they got their wrists slapped over was forcing OEMs to buy licenses for each computer shipped whether or not it ran Windows.
Do you really think that regulators in 2022 would force every platform vendor to remove all of their bundled software? They didn't do that in the 90s.
Here I am, enjoying my 4 year old iPhone, happily paying Apple $3/month for iCloud storage.
iCloud increasing the effective storage of the phone is about 10% of the value prop. Your point is like "dropbox is just rsync + a VPS".
No push notifications (this is unsurprising, Apple runs the push notification servers, and those cost money). I don't see anything about linking against third party libraries.
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More to the point, you keep using this term "rent seeking" to describe Apple selling optional services. Nobody is forcing an iPhone owner to pay Apple for services. Rent seeking implies once you have the thing, you have to pay rent on it. That's just not true for iPhones.