[speak_plainly]

Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense.

The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.

It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.

[ksec]

Ever since Apple moved to Services Strategy in 2014 it has been like this. Services were not there so they could provide a better experience for its "customers". I use the word "customer" here which is what Apple / Steve Jobs used to call their loyal fans, and not user. But to further growth their Revenue pie because they foresee iPhone one day will stagnant.

You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.

Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.

[D13Fd]

Fitness+ is actually super high quality, really well integrated with Apple’s products, and fun to use. I love it. I would happily pay the monthly Apple fee just for fitness+. I hope they don’t change it.

If there is anything that represents a “services strategy” like the Apple of the Jobs era, it’s fitness+.

[StilesCrisis]

They tried to kill _competitors'_ ads. Everyone else gets "Ask Not to Track" while Apple gets "Personalized Ads." It's so glaring once you see it.

[tonyedgecombe]

TV is pretty good even for my English sensibilities. Severance is some of the best television I’ve seen in a long time.

[addicted]

"customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better.

"user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using.

It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.

[kyriakos]

As someone who owns zero apple hardware, I feel like Apple TV (the service) is probably the most consistent producer of high quality TV shows.

[jangxx]

I actually like Fitness+, it got me working out for the first time in my life.

[browningstreet]

Against Youtube Music and Spotify, Apple Music rates quite well, at least IMO.

[esskay]

Arcade is comically poor value. I can't tell if Apple doesn't care, or they're just so deluded due to their insular nature and crap attitude towards gaming that they genuinely think its a good service to offer mediocre mobile games for a premium.

[dangus]

> You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad.

News+ is the only one of these that has poor quality.

Apple Music is extremely good, and pays artists better than many other platforms like Spotify. Unlike Spotify it isn’t enshittifying the product with AI music, video, and podcast distractions. The software is good quality, native code, not a web wrapper. Plus, there’s a classical music focused version that’s entirely separate.

Fitness+ is a premier product in the space. Have you tried it? The workouts sync with your watch and it has top tier video production quality along with a ton of thought put into accessibility.

Arcade probably does need to have more games added and more attention paid to it, but it’s basically the only place to get mobile games that aren’t stuffed full of gambling mechanics, pay to win, and advertisements.

Apple TV+ is literally the new HBO. They produce some of the most critically acclaimed shows on the planet, and broke the record for number of Emmy nominations by a single studio last year. The software is actually good, which is only really true for TV+ and Netflix. The production values, bitrate, and technology integration (Dolby Atmos/Vision etc) is second to none. MLS coverage by Apple is also top tier, again, with other sports networks regularly broadcasting mediocre quality (bad colors, muddy details, poor on-screen graphics). They’re also getting F1 for US viewers which is almost certainly going to be an improvement over the status quo.

[chaostheory]

Fitness, Music, Apple TV, Arcade, and even News are all fine at their price point.

Apple News is the most affordable way to access paywalled mainstream news

TV has decent shows

Games has decent games without IAP

Music is decent without ads

Fitness has gotten me in shape at a fraction of the cost of Les Mills or Beach Body

[abustamam]

"The only people who call customers 'users' are drug dealers and software companies."

[mghackerlady]

Apple Arcade is pretty good, I imagine it's good for parents that want to make sure their kids are playing actually decent games instead of whatever slop you find on the app store or roblox

[xwkd]

Over the past decade, there's been a lot of regulation forcing Apple to open up their "Apple only" integrated platforms.

It used to be the case that if Apple wanted to build a walled garden / cathedral, then in order to compete in the hardware marketplace they had to provide software that didn't suck. You knew that if you bought an Apple product, there was reasonable assurance that everything was tightly integrated. If it wasn't, you'd go buy a market alternative (Android, PC). In my mind, this means that they spent a lot of time and dev resources (i.e. money) on their Frameworks. I think it showed. Time was spent on design. They focused on opening up capabilities "the right way."

Now that's pointless. If the iPhone is just an Android phone with a different coat of paint, then dev resources are going to be shifted to a place where Apple can distinguish themselves in the market, where they have platforms that they can control: Services.

[afavour]

In fairness Apple did come up with a custom JSON format for articles:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat

The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow.

They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers.

I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.

[kyralis]

It's definitely that publishers don't want it.

This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.

[tsunamifury]

It’s almost like Google AMP was a good idea and solving this problem this community had a melt down over it.

[robmccoll]

They also bought and killed texture, a fantastic cross-platform magazine subscription service, to somehow further Apple News. I subscribed to Texture on Android. I wouldn't give a dollar to Apple News even if I was in the Apple ecosystem.

[naravara]

Apple News unironically would have been better if they had just made an RSS reader with a way to subscription gate feeds and a rule that you have to do provide the full text of the article. They could have just put their energy into just polishing up a known and weathered and broadly adopted technology but nooooo, they needed something with platform lock-in so they could book more “services revenue.”

They didn’t need to do like half the work they did, and a lot of what they did do in order to make the news feeds prettier are seldom adopted because Apple doesn’t want to do the hard partnership work to drive and support it.

[giancarlostoro]

Contrast with Apple TV+ which has insanely high quality shows. I feel like they arent advertising it enough and investing in it enough. One of my favorite shows that my daughter watches is on Apple TV+ the other on Amazon (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie).

Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.

[afavour]

A clear difference here is that Apple creates the TV+ shows and they don't create the News+ content. And I really don't think they want to get into the news content creation business.

[no_wizard]

News is ham-fisted as much by news organizations themselves as much as it is Apple. They don't want to sell through the News+ subscriptions, they want to tease a few articles and then upsell you to their subscription.

News organizations have really become quite aggressive about negotiating these things now, I think in large part because Meta (aka Facebook at the time) screwed them badly when it stopped revenue sharing.

This leads to a situation where a product that actually could at least be good and serviceable is a mess. They don't see News+ as being a positive to their businesses to bundle it into the subscription.

edit: I'm open to hearing others on this. I am only pointing out both Apple and the publishers are at fault for varying aspects of why Apple News+ ends up being a mediocre product

[mavhc]

Every news organisation thinks they're the one you want to read, they want you to be a loyal customer to them and not read other newspapers. Google News used to have "see 349 other articles on this story" which really showed how pointless news organisations were, constantly rewriting/licencing other people's content.

Any news aggregator platform is only used by news organisations under duress.

[Dylan16807]

That seems really short-sighted. A fair share of more than $100/year is a lot of money for news.

[projektfu]

Does Apple News still share Apple News links to articles instead of the canonical link? When I had an iPhone, I uninstalled/disabled Apple News because I don't like distractions but when people shared with me an Apple News link I couldn't open it, because it would go to the app store instead of a redirect for the article. Ironically, on Android, that wasn't a problem. I'd get the article.

[int_19h]

Yes, it still wraps them into https://apple.news links.

However when one such is opened in the browser, it - like any other app link - asks if you want to open it in the news app. And if you close that popup and click on "tap here", you get the link to the original article.

[SkipperCat]

When I click on links in Apple News, it stays in the Apple News app. That's the same on my phone, iPad and MacBook.

[basch]

For Apple to really win this space I believe they would need to release a cross platform Publisher tool and complete in the AMP space. Some kind of magazine design / web design software that publishes articles to a standard format and applies a layout over the top. Then the News app becomes a renderer/aggregator that does things better than the standard web browser.

[nntwozz]

At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint.

It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook.

SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after.

Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined.

It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_University

[naravara]

Old Apple had a productive tension between Jony Ive and Scott Forestall on which direction to go in with design, with Steve Jobs as a tie-breaker.

After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.

Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.

[thejohnconway]

> At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

This hardly an original sentiment, but when Steve Jobs died. Jobs was not perfect, but he believed they were there to make great products, had good taste with obsessive attention to detail, and was pretty much omnipotent in the company. I'm sure there are people with many of these traits in Apple, but not all of them together.

Their first new hardware release was the Apple Watch, which is a confused product, with too many functions on launch, and a poorly thought out two button + scroll wheel + touch screen interface (I still don't really know which button does which). And don't get me started on that ridiculous solid gold version.

You can still see the old Apple in there (look at their hardware!), but it's fragmented and not all pulling in the same direction.

[rchaud]

I'd say the inflexion point was in 2015. That's when Apple Music launched, sidelining the iTunes store where you could buy songs, in favor of a rental model like Spotify. That's also when they discontinued the Mac Server hardware and ceded the enterprise software market to Microsoft and Adobe.

Since then it's been on a nonstop drive to jam as many subscriptions services into the iOS ecosystem as possible.

[jorvi]

Steve Jobs was all about the customer experience, hence so many of his famous quotes. Two like the most are:

- Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products

- His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation.

He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it.

As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet.

Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days.

To be honest, I'm not sure if you can entirely blame Cook. Ever since the 2010s, it's felt like capitalism has reached an endstage culture, where it is no longer about an equilibrium between best product for lowest price vs minimum product for highest price, but instead just maximizing shareholder value at the cost of the customer, the workers, the business itself, the environment and what have you.

[munificent]

> At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

Probably showing my age here, but for me it was the introduction of the iPhone.

Yes, it was a wildly successful product. But it was a product primarily for consuming media (and I will grant taking photos). The iPhone marked Apple's transition from a computer company that focused on computers for creative people to a consumer electronics company.

Certainly a wise choice from a business perspective since there are a whole lot more people consuming things than making them.

But I do miss the old rainbow Apple days when I felt like they really cared about making hardware and software to empower creative people. I still use Macs, and I think they're still the best for creative work, but the company's not the same.

[kranke155]

Yes on the last count for Apple U.

The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences.

People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.

[ksec]

>At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple?

The simple answer would be when SJ passed away. The long answer is there wasn't a turning point, but a long period of cultural shift, due to Tim Cook being CEO.

Tim Cook not immediately taking a CEO stand and left a power vacuum was a mistake. He said himself he thought everything would continue as normal, which obviously did not happen. Firing Scott Forstall was a mistake. Ive taking over software design was a mistake. Not listening to the advice of Katie Cotton and manage a new PR direction was a mistake. Following Phill Schiller advice of firing long time Marketing Firm for Apple was a mistake. Tim Cook not understanding his weakness which is his judgement of character was a big big mistakes, as it leads to Dixon CEO and Burberry CEO taking helms of Apple Retail, ultimately stoping if not reversed the momentum of Apple Retails improvement and expansion by 10 years. Giving Ive the power to play around with Retail Design because Apple Retail Store is somehow a "social place" was a big mistake. Prioritising Operational and Supply Chain Decisions over Design was a mistake after around iPhone 8 Plus. Too focused on sales metric and bottom line was a big mistake. Shifting to Services Revenue, which should have been AppleCare, iCloud or even iPhone Subscription model, instead they got Apple TV+, in my option is a mistake. They were too scared to hurt the relationship with Carriers. Eddy Cue taking over a lot of decisions? Apple going to Davos? Merging of different iOS and macOS team where it used to be teams per product but later became functions per team structure. Trusting China and didn't diversify their production when Trump was first time in Office. ( They said they will but they didn't. Literally every single media lied on behalf of Apple ). I mean the list goes on and on.

I really like someone on HN said about Apple. Ever since Steve Jobs passed away Apple has been left on auto pilot mode for most of its time.

[insane_dreamer]

I use it daily and it's decent. It's easy enough to just filter out all of the low-quality news sources (either block those channels or "suggest less"). I use it for sources I want to occasionally read articles from but wouldn't subscribe to: WSJ, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Scientific American, or sources I do subscribe to but it's convenient to have them in one place (Atlantic, Wired, my local paper) instead of 5 different apps.

I mostly ignore the "For You" and go straight to browsing the sources I like, "saving" articles to read later, etc.

Never noticed there were lots of ads; I guess I'm used to just scrolling on by them automatically.

[el_benhameen]

I like using it to listen to narrated versions of New Yorker articles.

Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.

And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.

Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.

[kccqzy]

Remembering state is a giant oversight on many apps for content consumption, Apple News included. I sometimes read long articles on Apple News. I could be interrupted by a call or some messages. When I return to Apple News, it displays my half-finished article for a split second and returns to the home screen.

This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.

[m463]

> a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user.

I think I agree. They have a broad selection of apps... that all end up being shallow.

Every once in a while there are decent things hidden though - I like apple translate. I also like adding "copy text from a graphical image" to the OS.

[mgh2]

Why can't they build their own ad network for control instead of partnering with 3rd parties?

[vel0city]

Apple does have their own ad network. This is their ad network.

https://ads.apple.com/

[PaulHoule]

I looked a lot into the "universal paywall" business model where one subscription buys you access to articles from a wide range of news outlets. It's close to impossible to execute because the most prestigious outlets (ahem... The New York Times) won't give you the time of the day, even if you are startup royalty. That Apple has accomplished anything in this space is remarkable.

[__natty__]

At first minimalistic ui was because of UX. Today apple design managers went to the UI side forgetting about end user.

[icapybara]

FYI it would be "Icing on the cake" or "cherry on top"

[vachina]

It's not a revenue generating service.

[JKCalhoun]

I ignore Apple News these days. I had high hopes when Apple bought the company that eventually became their News app. Alas…

Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".

[givinguflac]

You can definitely block ads- try NextDNS.

[lotsofpulp]

90% of the content in the News+ app is itself an ad.