> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience.
YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!
It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?
ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.
This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
And, to make matters worse, you have things like the Charlie Brown Halloween Special, which Apple now owns the rights to. You cannot in any way search for the version you bought from Amazon. The only result Amazon shows is the result that would require you to pay for Apple TV. So you can either look through all of the stuff you bought from them, or find the original email for the purchase and click the link in there.
> This is how Amazon is too with the movies and tv shows you bought. There's no way to search your owned library anymore. You just have to page through it to find what you want. And your library is hidden away behind a tiny little unlabeled icon in the upper right corner.
This happened with (amazon owned) audible now too. When you try to search your own library instead it shows you books for sale. Even if you search for a book you know you already bought in your own library it will promote different versions of the book you don't own and try to see you those instead of showing you the one you own. It's incredibly frustrating and really manipulative and really sucks!
Downloaded movies, books especially. Back then, ebooks were barely a thing(early 2000s), and scanned/OCR copies were the only way to get most books to read on a device.
I even contacted a few authors and sent them money directly via paypal.
But then the market matured. I bought what I could on Amazon. Exported to epub to read as I pleased.
Then the Kindle app became horrendous. Now exporting is not a thing. So I just pirate books again.
It's too much effort otherwise.
And on top of that, if people will only lease me a book, and not sell it (Amazon), I'm not paying either.
As a Disney+ subscriber, I occasionally pirate content because the Web app acts up and refuses to play content I'm entitled to, even at degraded resolution.
I do this even though my desktop display is a smart TV that's perfectly capable of streaming 4K content, because side-by-side display of app and HDMI content is not an option.
Speaking of which, how do Disney and other streaming providers benefit from blocking 4K streaming in browsers once the 4K version is readily available to torrent, often at higher Blu-ray bitrates? Is this part of some backroom deal with TV and streaming device vendors?
As for e-books, I only buy them if they're either DRM-free or DRM is easily strippable.
I also check out physical books, CDs, and Blu-ray discs from libraries when possible, not because I believe DRM on borrowed library materials is unfair per se, but because I don't agree with the business models it has enabled.
>how do Disney and other streaming providers benefit from blocking 4K streaming in browsers once the 4K version is readily available to torrent, often at higher Blu-ray bitrates? Is this part of some backroom deal with TV and streaming device vendors?
Im pretty sure torrenting/piracy is a VERY small subset of people. I think it's been growing again, but everyone still thinks I'm doing things 'old school' when I mention illegally downloading movies for my Plex server
Edit: Google Search Trends for "torrent" suggest it is NOT on it's way back
its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating ebooks is to buying them.
when you pirate them versus buying them:
1a. searching for them has become incredibly easy
1b. searching for them is easy as well
2a. putting them on multiple devices is incredibly easy
2b. depending on the store, then you're going to be restricted to a particular device or app
3a. ten years from now, you'll have the same copy you bought
3b. in the case of amazon, they might arbitrarily modify the copy you "own"
Setting up a system for tv shows is a bit cumbersome, and of course disk consuming, but with a little bit of knowledge you get an extremely good and reliable system.
We really have completely forgotten the whole napster/itunes lessons.
I'm old now, I've got disposable income, I'm morally inclined to pay book authors but the stores and systems make the experience so completely unpleasant that I rarely use them.
> its incredible how much easier and convenient pirating ebooks is to buying them.
Pirating everything is easier than buying, copyright owners have firmly adopted this mindset. It keeps swinging across the line of comfort up and down over the decades and these days its mostly back down. Games don't have OS Ring 0 level denuvo style crap making your computer more vulnerable and slower, and these days all big ones have all patches available pretty quickly after release. Plus sometimes its good to wait few days before applying if its not a disaster, instead of auto-update.
Remember those unskippable FBI warnings in beginning of official movies? Unknown in pirated version. Even these days with say Netflix stuff that is in EU, but isn't in Switzerland (or it is but only in german voiceover, even though I live in french part FFS. Where is original voice? Who knows). Movies keep disappearing from collection. I know, not a fault of Netflix as much as copyright owners, but at the end I don't care. So I have 10 TB local drive, 1080p/4K in quality I prefer, with audio and subs I prefer.
Music - nothing beats local collection of flacs, I can listen to them on plane or elsewhere without any signal (or half around the world with no good roaming), top quality streamed via aptx lossless to Sennheiser plugs, absolute top. For discovery free Spotify is enough, not forking 20 bucks for me & my wife monthly, thats a ridiculous sum just for (average quality) music.
Books - I feel like if I buy/bought I would be re/buying them over my life numerous times, collection stability and ease of use of shops isn't something I trust long term. I agree with all you write above.
Spotify offers lossless now. But before that the highest quality was 320 kbps AAC, and if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier (and in that case, sure - go for the lossless option)
You can also download up to 10,000 songs per device for offline use, which should be enough for a plane ride
I can see other issues one might have with Spotify, but I don’t really think those are among them. I’ve had it for about 15 years, and I’ve been consistently happy with it for my own use
>if you’re able to differentiate between that and lossless even on state of the art equipment under perfect conditions, for the vast majority of songs, you’re an extreme outlier
Misconception: perfect conditions are what lossy codecs are designed for. You're actually more likely to hear compression artifacts under imperfect conditions that break the assumptions of psychoacoustic masking. Examples include strongly distorted frequency response from poor speakers, accidental comb filtering from room reflections, or even merely listening through a home surround sound system that matrix-decodes a stereo signal into additional channels, thus spatially isolating sounds that were assumed to be masked.
This comment is funny because the one it's replying to could also be read as justifying the theft from the public domain perpetrated by DRM etc. as a fair response to piracy.
I feel like about the only thing not worth pirating these days due to enshitification is games and podcasts. Steam still makes it easy, questions about licensing aside.
It truly warms my heart to see that the entire Hacker News population only pirates things out of pure moral principle. A noble stand for user experience. You PayPal’d the authors too? Beautiful. Inspirational. That is basically philanthropy. Mother Teresa but with a seedbox.
At this point it is obvious that every piece of content worth pirating mysteriously ends up locked behind the “we hired an enterprise consultant who has never used a computer” user experience. Which means pirating is not stealing, it is simply undoing a curse. I used to think taking someone’s work without permission was wrong. But now I understand that if they make me click more than two times or sign up for an account that wants my blood type, the theft automatically becomes a principled act of civil disobedience. Robin Hood with magnet links.
My friend tried to ruin this beautiful moral architecture I’ve built. He goes, “You’re just lying to yourself. This is motivated reasoning. People justify actions after doing them so they don’t feel guilty.” Then he starts rattling off psychological terminology like he’s been waiting his entire life to use the phrase “post-hoc rationalization” in a sentence. He even said cognitive dissonance while maintaining full eye contact, which should honestly be illegal outside of a grad seminar or a cult.
He’s like, “You want the thing. Then you explain to yourself why it was okay to take the thing.”
And I was like: Wow. Incredible. Thank you, professor Brain Surgeon PhD of Human Morality and Meme Piracy. Please invoice me for the lecture. I’ll pay you in exposure and a strongly worded moral shrug.
Because here is the truth:
I am not justifying anything. I am suffering. I am enduring the emotional hardship of navigating a UI that looks like it was designed in Microsoft Access by someone who hates joy. Do you understand the courage it takes to ignore that Buy Now button and instead go spelunking into the digital underworld like I’m Indiana Jones but for PDFs?
This is not theft. This is archaeology.
And yes, sometimes what I excavate is a folder labeled “S04E01–S04E23 (WEB-DL 2160p)” with subtitles and commentary tracks that legally shouldn’t exist. But that is not piracy.
That is restoration of cultural heritage.
The Library of Alexandria burned.
I’m simply making sure Season 4 doesn’t.
The first is people who don't have the money, e.g. students. They will never pay you; they don't have the money.
The second is people who do have the money but value the experience above other things. These would be your best customers, if you provide the better experience.
If you don't provide the better experience, they don't pay. Is that a rationalization? Maybe, but are you better off to whinge about it or to take away their excuse?
Let us be clear from the start. This thread is not about piracy. Everyone pirates. Everyone knows everyone pirates. The internet is a vast floating marketplace of digital oranges stolen from the same tree. The practical question is boring.
The interesting question is psychological.
How do you, personally, live with yourself while doing it?
Why do people in this thread need to build entire theological systems of justification just to sleep at night?
That is the comedy here.
Not the piracy.
The denial.
Because if someone simply said,
“Yes, I stole it because I wanted it and did not feel like paying,”
I would respect that.
Honesty. Integrity, even if dark.
But this thread is packed with people inventing ethical origami to explain why pressing the magnet link was actually a noble act of cultural preservation, spiritual support, intellectual necessity, or cosmic fairness. We are not talking about Kant. We are talking about a TV show and a PDF.
And then there is the classic justification play:
“I already bought the ebook on Kindle years ago. But I need a clean PDF to mark up on my iPad for research. Amazon will not give me a DRM free copy. I refuse to buy the same book twice. So I torrented a pristine academic version. I am simply aligning formats with my rightful ownership.”
The phrasing is beautiful. It sounds like a legal defense and a eulogy at the same time.
But think about it without the internet anesthesia. The bookstore will not give you a hardcover just because you bought the paperback once. You want the hardcover. So you go to the bookstore at night, slip a brick through the window, crawl in, take the hardcover, and walk out. You say to yourself on the way home, “I am merely aligning formats for research purposes.” People do not debate nuance when you break a window. They call the police. They call it theft.
Digital removes the broken glass.
So people remove the guilt.
They fill the empty space with story.
This is what I am calling out. Not piracy. Human psychology. The instinct to preserve self image at any cost. The inability to say a simple sentence:
I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Instead we get excuses from the Pirate Justification Vending Machine
I am archiving culture
I am previewing it
I will pay later
I support the creator emotionally
I did buy it once, in 2014, which grants eternal metaphysical ownership across all formats for all time including the direct brain injection edition in the year 2089
And then sometimes someone sends the author twelve dollars via PayPal and walks away like they personally restored the moral balance of the universe. It is adorable. Like a drug lord funding a kid science fair and expecting applause.
So yes, piracy happens. Yes, I do it too. The reason does not matter. But I am not delusional about it. I do not rename theft as cultural stewardship. I do not wrap it in story. I am a thief. Not a romantic one. Not a noble one. Just one who wanted a thing and took it. I can live with that truth.
The problem is not piracy. The problem is the lengths people will go to avoid looking in the mirror.
The thread is not about economics.
It is about ego protection.
And seeing adults twist themselves into philosophical pretzels to avoid saying a simple uncomfortable sentence is the funniest part of all of this.
The broken glass and the physical object are the actual difference in that case. The book store is paying for the glass and the unit cost of printing the hardcover.
You've diverged from criticizing rationalization of not paying to accusing someone who actually paid of doing something wrong. Now who is rationalizing the double dipping and copyrights that last so excessively long the medium they were released in becomes outmoded before they expire?
> I pirated it because I wanted it. End of explanation.
Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
Oh simple. Remove the glass and I pick the lock of the front door to your home and walk in at night while you, your wife and your kids are fast asleep and I scan the book that I want with a portable scanner. Not just one book. Many book across many nights. No damage done right? Once your wife and you find out that that’s all I’m doing you guys are totally ok with this.
> Which isn't a sufficient explanation if it doesn't reveal what it would take for you to pay instead.
Easy. What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Either way. The topic of this thread is not about what would make me pay. That’s fucking obvious. The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
I’m a thief. I sail the high seas. Am I proud of it? No. But I’m not delusional about it like this entire thread.
> Oh simple. Remove the glass and I pick the lock of the front door to your home and walk in at night while you, your wife and your kids are fast asleep and I scan the book that I want with a portable scanner. Not just one book. Many book across many nights. No damage done right? Once your wife and you find out that that’s all I’m doing you guys are totally ok with this.
So now you want to replace the things that aren't happening in the digital case with some other things that aren't happening in the digital case?
Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It's pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You'd make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials. Which doesn't seem nearly as objectionable as breaking into a bookstore or a house or stealing a physical object with a unit cost, because it isn't.
> What causes people to not steal other than good will? What causes people to not kill other than altruism. The government and society has several methods for this. Jail time? Locks? Etc. It’s just hard to do the same for piracy.
Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
> The topic is about the less obvious thing and why people like you go to elaborate lengths to side step admitting that you’re a fucking thief.
Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
>So now you want to replace the things that aren’t happening in the digital case with some other things that aren’t happening in the digital case?
Oh I see. You think the physical break-in imagery is the problem, not the behavior itself. Cute. The point flew over your head so hard it’s now in low Earth orbit.
Nobody is saying the method is identical. The point is the moral equivalence.
If you want a book that you do not have, and you obtain it without permission, the only difference between burglary and piracy is how easy it is to lie to yourself afterward.
Digital theft just comes pre-laundered.
No broken window. No police report. Just a clean conscience and a folder named “Book_Final_FINAL2.pdf.”
>Your analogy is barely even an analogy. It’s pretty obvious what the physical equivalent would be. You’d make a copy of the paperback as a hardcover, yourself in your own place with your own materials.
Fantastic. And where exactly are you getting the paperback to copy, professor?
Are you growing it in a hydroponic book farm? Summoning it from the astral plane? Wishing really, really hard?
To “make your own copy at home” you must first acquire the book.
And if you do not buy it or borrow it, you steal it.
Congratulations. You have just walked right back into the house at night with a scanner, only you changed the lighting and think the ethics changed with it.
The source is the theft. Not the printing method.
This is not subtle. You are just allergic to saying it out loud.
>Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the companies selling this stuff to care about and do everything they can to retain that good will, right?
Yes, and they do, and pirates still pirate.
Spotify. Steam. Netflix. Apple Books. Kindle.
Platforms with instantaneous, frictionless, brain-dead-simple purchasing flows already exist.
And people still torrent.
Because the UX excuse was never the real reason.
It was just the most socially presentable one.
People do not need better UX.
They need better courage to say:
“I wanted it and I took it.”
>Were the people saying they were returning to piracy not admitting they were returning to piracy, or were they just explaining what it would take to make them not?
No. They were explaining how to preserve their self image while returning to piracy.
They were not saying:
“I pirate.”
They were saying:
“I pirate but I am still a good person because I have constructed a beautiful little narrative terrarium where I am the protagonist of justice.”
This thread is not about piracy.
It is about delusion.
⸻
Let me say it plainly so your brain has no escape hatch:
To read a book you do not have, you must obtain it.
If you obtain it without permission in the physical world, you break in somewhere.
If you obtain it without permission in the digital world, you click a link.
The click feels cleaner, so you tell cleaner stories.
Ah, the classic HN Passive Aggressive Concern Troll.
“Are you okay mate?”
Translation: I want to insult you, but I do not want dang to notice.
It is the same genre as:
“I am genuinely confused how someone could think this.”
Translation: I am calling you stupid.
or
“This feels emotional rather than reasoned.”
Translation: I have no counterargument.
You are not being kind. You are being condescending while wearing a cardigan of civility. It is the approved HN way of calling someone unwell without saying the word stupid directly. Very on brand. Very polite venom.
If you think my point is wrong, say why.
If you cannot, do not hide behind a wellness check.
So yes, I am okay.
Are you okay?
Because it seems like making eye contact with your own reasoning gave you altitude sickness.
Setup is tricky first time and permissions can be a horror, but after that it’s ‘Rrs doing it all.
Sonarr, Radarr etc. it’s all automated and if you use lists you don’t actually touch it unless adding a new series, it just works.
I pay for usenet indexers and access, VPNs and Plex. I also pay for Netflix, Sky for Appletv.
The piracy setup costs far more to run the streaming services.
I do it for the quality and the all in 1 nature. I pay for the streaming services too, which makes me feel less bad about it. I should cut one or the other, but haven’t yet.
Yeah I would say you’re the minority use case or you’re lying. People who pay for and therefore fund pirates usually don’t pay for legal services as well.
Setup of an automated media server and the containers it requires was more or less my training for an IT role. Similar setups were maintained by most the staff and all also had streaming accounts.
I can’t fault the training, it helped me out of many jams.
I would still make fun of you for hoarding physical media. Mine now lives on my NAS, a black box of spinning HHDs sitting in my living room, to which i have saved copies of everything i care about. My music exists as files which i coppy to my phone's music folder, my movies as files that i can stream to my tablet without any mention of clouds. With recent improvements in storage tech, short of a raging fire, "my" media is safer there on my personal server than it is with apple.
My nas has moved to a new house now three times. Even before i have internet setup in my new place, if i want to rewatch some old movie i dont check to see whether Apple or google still has it, i just open up VLC and find it right where i saved it on my nas a decade ago.
I did the same: tended to use Apple services then when I hit poverty I was able to use my NAS copies of music and videos after cancelling subscriptions. Had a "so why was I paying for years?" moment especially with all the enshitification issues
You are indeed correct. I'm the type of person who watches movies once and rarely goes back to re-watch them. But there are just a few things I truly wish to support and will go back and enjoy years later.
I went from a 0 movie collection to buying a higher end Blu-Ray player and purchasing UHD movies. Which is deeply ironic because I'm losing the ability to purchase movies locally with stores like BestBuy discarding them to Wal-Mart only having a few and none I wish to own.
Nothing I hate more than "where can I watch X" and the response is "you can't".
I appreciate the attempt, but have never seen the point personally.
That is, many physical media collectors do it to have nice box sets to display, or in an attempt to have off-line copies of media, but I have never met anyone who goes to the effort of ensuring long-term readability - which is understandable, it is a huge hassle. Unless you are copying the content to new physical media every so often it will eventually rot and become unplayable.
For example, for optical media the expected lifetime is only a couple of decades depending on the type of media [1]. I believe commercially pressed DVD and blueray are somewhere around 10-20 years.
Outside of manufacturing defects you can expect HTL blu-rays to last for more than a hundred years when stored properly. Some estimates are as high as 300 years. Don't buy the cheap ones or store them outdoors and you'll be fine.
Some archival grade disc's are estimated to last 700 years or more and dont cost THAT much more.
DVD's and CDR'S used organic dies that broke down quickly. Blu-rays mostly use inorganic dies that last forever. Cheap LTH disc's being the exception.
MOST manufacturers like Verbatimm do not even produce the organic die LTH disc's anymore as people stopped buying them. There are still some floating around for sale, so avoid them.
Not necessarily as even the factory produced optical discs have had issues with de-lamination, oxidation etc. Of course a lot of that had to do with companies cheaping out on manufacturing in order to make that last tenth of a cent of profit as they tend to do.
I've canceled Amazon Prime precisely due to this issue. All I wanted was to browse the videos that are included in the subscription, but instead I'm bombarded with videos that I need to pay extra for. Which made me recognzize that the subscription is useless, so I'll watch videos at other streaming platforms.
This analogy to Amazon is why I submit the idea that customers don’t care and expect advertising.
Look up the brand perception of Amazon. It’s one of the highest in the business including high trust scores. High trust scores, for a company that sells counterfeit products! Perception is not reality.
Your average consumer (I.e., complete dumbass) barely recognizes advertisements and often reports enjoying them when they do recognize them. I can’t count how many people tell me that they see products advertised to them in Instagram that are exactly what they wanted/like.
When Steve Jobs ran Apple it was a niche premium computer company who had customers with above average incomes and education levels. It was different time. He died more than 10 years ago.
That’s not exactly what Apple is today. iPhones are used by over half of all Americans. You can’t really buy a decent computer that’s cheaper or a better value proposition than the previous generation MacBook Air $550 Walmart special.
As a side note, I would note that Apple Maps already has “ads,” because it has a Yelp integration. I think this whole thing is a part of removing that and bringing the same functionality in-house.
I think you’d be insane not to monetize Maps with Apple being the size that it is. It costs a huge amount of money to operate as a free service, and your median customer expects ads to be there.
If you want that niche, discerning customer experience, buy a Framework or System76: Linux has the same marketshare now that Apple had when Jobs returned to Apple.
> Look up the brand perception of Amazon. It’s one of the highest in the business including high trust scores. High trust scores, for a company that sells counterfeit products! Perception is not reality.
Amazon for most of its history has had an extremely generous return policy. People don't trust them to send something good, they trust them to take it back if it's not.
It is still kind of niche in many countries whose population can only dream of US salaries, and will keep that way as Apple will never give up on their margins.
How are you browsing your Amazon content? I see search bars on the 'All Content' [1] page, and also on each individual page, like my movies and shows [2].
Though it seems like the interface is pretty rubbish in the Prime Video section [3], so maybe that's where you're looking?
Roku based TVs and their mobile app. And the website - #3 in your list above. Never seen those other two links, and they don't show up when you're trying to watch things on your tv.
Yeah shame it’s hidden behind 50 pop-under triggers and infectious scam ads. Literally unusable without an ad blocker. (Which you should use anyway but it means they’re not a great choice for Joe user on his unprotected windows pc)
A bit deeper into the scene, there are no ads anymore. And the biggest problem for most people in the west, is rather just using torrents without a VPN will get you lawyers letters quite quickly. But Joe average can use youtube downloader without danger.
They only send them to ISPs in major markets such as the US, and some providers just redirect them to /dev/null, but a lot of providers that are larger will terminate your service for repeated violatioins.
I hadn't done it in years either... Then just recently downloaded a show. Less than 5 minutes later, I have an email from my ISP with the name of the show telling me to stop it.
The principle of torrents are, everyone downloading has the ip of all the other participants for p2p to work. All it takes is one node recording that other nodes send copywrited data to them, to get the real adresses of them (via ISP).
yep: seedbox + this + jeyllfin = unlimited streaming of anything i want for $15/month. no ads, no terrible app UIs, no autoplaying previews, no content getting removed, not having 4 different streaming subscriptions that are hard to cancel, no fuckery at all.
I set this up for my husband who barely knows which end of a PC to use. He's filled up the 4TB media array and now I need more disks (or better retention policies)
One, people should be using uBlock Origin as you mentioned. Two, there are many search engines without such ads. Three, qBittorrent has a search right inside the client, there is no need to even access the websites to perform searches.
You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.
Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)
Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.
I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.
An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.
An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now.
Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.
For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).
iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.
I think you are at least partly right. The period after Jobs left was pretty bad. The Mac was too expensive and not providing enough advantages to be worthwhile. But the work that happened at NeXT basically enabled the Mac to make a comeback (macOS is basically a variant of the NeXT OS).
And indeed this is the period when they did play quite nice but I don't think it was only to get back in the game. I think Steve Jobs really had a goal, a "higher-purpose" towards offering elegant, powerful and easy to use computing devices. If that wasn't true, he would never had started NeXT in the first place, this endeavor nearly bankrupted him, so it wasn't just about greed.
But nowadays the hardware products are quite good (often best in class) but they are way too greedy and very negligent towards what actually matters, the software (having good hardware that cannot run any good software is rather useless).
It sounds like they are well on their way down the "Enshittification" [1] path. Eventually they will enshittify sufficiently that the illusion will shatter.
We need another commercial desktop OS to compete with Microsoft. The problem is Apple is shooting itself in the foot with their greed on hardware pricing.
This is the reasons many heavy/high-duty software never makes it to the Mac, it's just too expensive to outfit everyone with performant enough Mac computers.
It's pretty sad because they don't even need the money, and clearly they have shown in the past 10 years that they are completely unable to do anything better with the surplus money.
It's just self-defeating greed, they could eat a lot of Microsoft market share where it matters but instead they try to push an even more locked-down approach with the iPadOS.
Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
Google has long dealt with this problem with AdWords and search results. Google still tries to make the exact thing your searching for be the #1 organic result. Yes there are promoted links but they're not as prominent.
The App Store #1 result, which is always an ad, is quite literally half the screen.
I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
> Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always* places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
> I don't know how advertising works on the App STore but I suspect it's a CPM model not a CPC model (like AdWords). So Apple just doesn't care. But I don't think this would ever have happpened in the Steve Jobs era.
Nope, it's CPC (they call it CPT as it's mobile) and it cost less time to find out than writing this comment ;)
The iBooks one situation is the worst for me. Underneaths it’s actually a really good epub reader with the infinite scroll set up. Perfect for one hand reading.
The front page got so annoying with all these trashy books that I eventually had to DNS blocking some iTunes/Apple endpoints. And now it just displays my current reading books, the previous titles and the daily goal every time I open iBooks.
One huge downside of iBooks is that it would happily deauthorize access to the (DRM free) epub files you’ve added to the app manually after a couple of days without internet connection. I made a mistake of going on a long distance hiking trip and thinking can read some books in the tent before falling asleep. Nope, eBooks refused me until I returned to the mobile coverage area and resynced my library with their cloud service. I switched to an offline-first 3rd party app immediately after.
Here are the two I have for iBooks. I’m using NextDNS so it will still get blocked when I’m outside the house. I only read my local epubs so I don’t know if blocking these will affect anything you bought on the store.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue (due to inflation). Until we measure, define, and value experience in nominal terms through data, most leaders won't care because it will remain an estimate against hard data.
It does exist. I ripped my CD collection ~20 years ago. VLC and Finamp both work great as players depending on whether you want to just load up files in a directory, or have a more advanced media server (jellyfin) that can do stuff like transcode FLAC to opus on the fly for mobile clients.
Yes, profoundly true and sadly profoundly not understood by most. Levers can be pulled for near term quantitative gains at the expense of long term qualitative experience. ERP systems and the like largely measure the quantitative, all things pegged to the almighty dollar. Most orgs have no such system or competency (with the exception of siloed martech systems) for measuring the qualitative. And the customer journey isn’t set up in such a way to reliably and consistently throw off the needed data in the first place. I’ve been preaching that orgs looking for true longevity need to make measuring experiences and sentiment a core competency, so the qualitative impact of levers being pulled can be measured and reported on in realtime, allowing short sighted decisions to be backtracked, and ideally, long term, putting functional guard rails in place that prevent those decisions from being made in the first place.
> I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue.
I disagree. They know exactly what they're doing. Executives get paid and promoted based on quarterly profitability, not long-term vision or a sustainable business model. By the time the damage from what they've done is apparent and felt, the execs responsible will have long since retired to a beach somewhere in the tropics, or taken a higher paying role at another company where they'll start the process anew.
> Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue (due to inflation).
Yes that is capitalism however if inflation cuts value of money in half and in the same time your revenue doubles, did you actually double your revenue? Do you even need to change your service or product to justify raising prices when the currency is being devalued? For both these questions there is a strong case that the answer is no.
Thus begs the question why monetary inflation exists. Govts and banks are given god-like power over who gets access to the new money. From there it simply devalues all else.
The worst part of it is that despite all this, Apple still has the least frustrating desktop experience overall, at least for the casual user who needs things to "just work", because the bar is plummeting that fast. Especially when looking at Windows.
The only thing I can imagine is that both Apple and Microsoft will bog down the desktop equally in AI garbage, to the point where both are approximately equally unusable.
Briefly, with an example: instead of going through menus looking for the option you need, you can just tell the AI (with a voice command) what you want to do. At that point it does not matter who has the nicest menus.
Advanced users are already seeing this. You don't need HandBrake anymore. You can just use ffmpeg directly and ChatGPT will tell you the command line arguments.
This is why you should always pirate digital media, even if you bought it.
A pdf or epub file will never bother you in that way. And if they do, you can edit it and remove that trash.
I always pirate the media i buy and/or the physical books i buy.
Loading pdf documents into GoodNotes (regularly bought) is the quickest way to make them usable (no bullshit, no ads AND i can take… good notes on the pages).
This is especially egregious in the Books app on all platforms. I dream of a version that presents you with your library on launch instead of the store — good user experience would expect you to be opening the app to read books 99% of the time, not to purchase new ones.
Thankfully, on macOS, you can disable the store in the Music app entirely. This will probably be removed at some point. When disabled, the only remnant is a small username in the bottom-left corner of the screen. I would love to see this gone as well, but local libraries are increasingly of no concern to Apple or the general public so I doubt they will fix this.
> uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience
As Jobs understood (per TFA), pushing ads degrades the user experience - the prime differentiating factor for Apple products in the first place, and what attracted many people to the platform.
It's bad, and it's probably going to get worse as Apple's services businesses increase their share of revenue and exert expanding influence over product design within the company.
Banning Apple from leveraging its platform for advertising Apple services might help, but the fact that we have arrived at the point where we have to rely on antitrust enforcement to make Apple products less intrusive and user-hostile shows that the company has lost its way.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
Unfortunately, requirements that Apple provide a choice to install Spotify rather than Apple Music, or Kindle rather than Apple Books, on a new iPhone doesn't fix the problem.
It's a general trend with hired managers who optimize for their bonuses. Also many founder led companies when they got sold to the shareholders are also optmizing for that. Some founder led companies are optimizing for something else, not profits only, but that's rare and that's what Jobs had the leeway to do when he got back to the almost bankrupt company.
Current minions will try to squeeze more profit from any screen the incentives are such that they'd do that.
Enshitification is possible where there is some kind of lock-in and the pain of leaving is greater than the level of annoyance of the product. Apple has one of the strongest lock-in ecosystems and it's rational for them to do so.
I'm not sure there is a better way, because max freedom = open source, but that equals mostly subpar experience for the average user. Let's hope for more platforms and data transfer from one to the other.
>> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
I would have argued against this in the past. But in iOS 26 they introduced the ability to 'pin' 6 favourite playlists or albums to the top of your library. Really useful. If you don't have a subscription (to Apple Music or iTunes Match) you don't get the feature. There is zero reason to do this other than to milk people for more money when they've already spent over $1k on the device and likely spent hundreds purchasing the music from iTunes Store.
I haven't seen ads on the App Store for a long time. To update my apps I just long press the App Store icon and tap Updates. It leads you directly to the updates without going to the homepage.
I just opened up App Store and the first screen is a full screen ad for Roblox. Then you scroll down and it’s 4 “now trending” ads, then below that another full screen as. The entire “Today” tab is a scroll full of ads.
That's why I don't open the App Store's first screen or the Today tab. I usually open the App Store to look at the release notes for my updatable apps. To find new apps, I use Google to find an app's page. A web-based search engine has blockable ads, the App Store app does not.
I disagree.
You can disable all the apps—in fact never use _any_ app if you can avoid it altogether.
Apps are inherently bad, and the web version is always better.
It didn’t have to be like this, but here we are.
I often go weeks without opening any app but the browser on my phone.
True and if there was a good dumb phone alternative I would prefer that probably.
I do however need to use some apps sometimes unfortunately.
My bank for example implemented some proprietary 2fa method that I need to use an app for (or i buy a special device to it which also seems inconvenient).
Anyway it’s the only phone i ever bought; only used 2hand ones before and I’ll probably won’t buy another
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Apple's beancounters have figured out that they just have to be more polished than Microsoft and Google's environments, and despite the legitimate complaints you've made, they still are.
Precisely. This is their "Have the cake and eat it too" strategy, where so long as they aren't as egregious as their competitors, they know it's a Net gain as most of their customers will still feel the grass is still greener in their wall garden than elsewhere. Even if the grass isn't near as green or well kept so to speak as it used to be.
Modern iPhones? iTunes/iPod sync still works just fine. However, you have to question if that’s what most people who use iPhone want. For one thing, mobile users don’t necessarily have a PC. Mobile is the main device for most users not PC which is different from 2007. Also, I bet many users prefer ad supported free music streaming services if they never pay for music over a system of organizing custom MP3 downloaded.
Arguably Android has a much worse and fragmented default experience with respect to having a decent jukebox music player that does it the old school way.
Android allows changing, and disabling, the default though. Last I checked, trying to open an MP3 will demand the Music app on an iPhone, and clicking an Apple Music link will do the same instead of allowing one to open a webpage
When I put it away, I always leave it there (or in an open book) and it always stays there (or in an open book).
At least on Mac, I have noticed the Apple TV app seems to stay on one of the Library tabs indefinitely if I leave it there, but maybe it has just escaped their notice.
On the other hand, there’s no separate tab for “Continue Watching.” (A partial work-around is using the widget.)
Hey now. If they allowed you to simply enjoy the stuff you have without butting in to remind you of everything you don’t have, you might actually feel a moment of lightness and happiness. If they want you spending money they need to cultivate feelings of covetousness, inadequacy, or fear. Contentment doesn’t sell.
Apple’s services pull in more revenue than Macs and iPads combined.
The expectation that they won’t advertise them is, unfortunately, not a reasonable one.
You can turn off Apple Music the service entirely from the music app. If you stick to the library tab in books you’ll never see an ad. It’s really not anywhere close to the worst offender in the industry.
I haven’t used Apple devices back when they were good so I have always avoided all the built-in Apple bloat/adware.
Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software.
It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.
As a Linux user, I feel like a different breed here: I'm pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from now will be pretty much the same, and I'm happy about that.
> I'm pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from now will be pretty much the same
It will be better, in ways I can't predict. But almost every detail of the interaction will improve somehow. But probably no big changes on the more mature parts.
Oh, and it will have one infuriating thing that people keep doing wrong because everybody insists it's the right way. I'll lose some small functionality for disabling it.
> I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me.
The books app itself is infuriating. It's more like a store with a list of purchases attached. Every single time I want to pull up my audiobooks, for instance, I hit the "audiobooks" button.... just to find the store instead. Every time I want to search through my library, I use the "search" box... just to find the store instead. Maddening.
The apple music app I actual really like, probably because it's not actually easy to purchase anything through it. The only major ask is that they stop limiting the number of recently added so I can actually find music I added
I was gifted an iPad for Christmas a few years back and quickly found out there's nothing you can do on it without either looking at ads or paying a subscription. I returned it before the factory battery charge ran out.
> I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app
That doesn't change if you buy the subscription even. I moved to YT Music only because the Apple Music app asked me to subscribe every time I used it. I was already subscribed.
I hated using the Books app without the book store disabled. The setting is buried in Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Allowed Apps & Features -> Book Store
Like fitness where they want you to activate Fitness+. This means the one they are shipping is trash? Plus, thank you, I know where the App store is in case I need it
This behaviour deeply bothers me, and my family doesn't get it. I've tried to explain it, but I think they're so accustomed to it that it doesn't really matter to them or occur to them as nefarious or malicious.
The way I see it, this type of behaviour by Apple (or any other company doing this) is an invasion of mental real estate. When you force things in front of my eyes that I didn't ask to see, or in my ears, or whatever, that's occupying my brain cycles and space in ways that are entirely uninvited.
Of course, the EULAs and whatnot all require me to agree to this bullshit, so fine, it's technically invited when I opened the application and said "sure, try to sell me your stuff", but to me this isn't the spirit of the software or operating system at ALL, and has been a signal of worse things to come for some time now. It's essentially enshittification.
My answer has been to stop using it. After 25 years of using Apple's computers and around 12 years on their phones, I'm migrating off. No more iPhone, Apple Watch, Airpods, etc. I'm still on a mac and that'll be hard to change, but it's slowly happening. I spent the last week on the ocean and in the woods on a toughbook, and that was kind of fun. It was eye opening to take a computer where I'd never take a macbook.
I find this kind of behaviour totally deplorable anyway, and I can't tolerate it. It's insidious and damaging to their brand because ultimately it's harmful to their users. They want number to go up, I get it, but I'm not their fodder.
If Apple puts ads in its Maps, there will be an opening for a gorgeously-skinned OpenStreetMaps app. Possibly even with a $1/year WhatsApp-style subscription.
I really fucking hate ads. I’ll first pay to avoid them. If I can’t, I’ll bail. Because we live in a capitalist society, I’ll take folks with me.
Organic Maps is very close to be that gorgeous OSM app. Unfortunately, it still lacks a lot of functionality that’s missing from OSM dataset, and is present in most commercial mapping apps, like the opening hours for businesses, public transport schedules or user reviews.
I don't know what you're complaining about, this is obviously about making user interactions delightful. Of course most people will cherish the bundling opportunities of Apple products, and would be offended if similar books weren't shown in their libraries as easy purchases. It's delightful.
/s
More seriously: Apple, please never rework the compass, I don't need ads for Apple Compass+ when I'm hoping to figure out which was is north.
> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store
> Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store
As a Windows person I see these as features, not criticisms. Windows not having good builtin versions of these or other apps is either a cause or effect of there being a robust ecosystem of third-party choices, both open-source and commercial.
My frustration with Apple when I tried it out was that you either use iTunes or there's little other choice. Technically some choice, yes, but because most people are passive and use the Apple stuff by default, there's a smaller community of developers who are motivated to try to compete.
When I see people criticize Notepad in Windows (for example) it feels irrelevant because you're not expected to use Notepad for anything but the most trivial use cases. There are so many other, better options, and the platform has a culture of exploring those options.
Microsoft used to have one of the best media players around! Windows used to have built in streaming support from device to device. You could load up music on your personal PC and play it on your home theater through your Xbox360! Windows Media Player was huge, only eclipsed by Winamp at the time.
Eventually MS released the Zune app, which was also awesome but lacked many of the WMP features. (But it looked amazing!)
They also were huge in the ebook space for years before amzn sucked all the air out of the room.
They also tried to popularize a standards based in car stereo system a decade before car play became a thing, and the first Windows tablets were released in the 1990s!
Oh and they tried to make a smart TV box in 1999, because of course they did. (Nearly 20 years too early, oops!)
(I was there first hand to witness it again and again!)
Bill Gates is terrifyingly smart. He sees trends decades ahead. But knowing something is coming (smart TVs) does you no good without timing.
You build a first gen product, accrue mountains of legacy tech debt in the process (being first is hard! There is no one else to learn lessons from!) and then a competitor comes along and makes a V2 when the market is more ready and they can implement it better than you because they can learn from everything you did wrong (possibly also hiring half your team away).
Timing is equally important as product. Making a smart TV before widespread broadband adoption? Before streaming video had a flood of high quality content? Oops.
Real Player was doing streaming video in the 90s! Everyone knew it was the future, it was obviously the future! The future is now and the majority of video is streaming from a server somewhere!
Great idea, but ouch that timing. (That said, founders got rich anyway, and real video was a necessary step to where we are now!)
> So what’s the lesson for future business leaders? Someone has to be first.
Let it be someone else. Maybe spinoff promising new ideas where you can't follow others. If you can find ideas to be second on, look at old product annpuncements from companies that tend to be too early and shut down products that don't have engagement. Microsoft and Yahoo are good ones.
Or, do the new idea, patent the hell out of it, let it die, and when the idea comes around again, get some licensing revenue.
The problem with Microsoft being a first mover is they're too big. A small line of business is a problem for most big companies. It acrues too little customer oriented development to grow, because the numbers don't justify investment; but it acrues all the corporate cruft development and the product becomes hard to pivot under the weight of three rebrands.
But this can't work. Then why would anyone innovate? I reject the assertion that it's impossible to innovate and develop a viable product. My question is what makes a company able to do both?
Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets. Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience waiting for AR/VR.0
There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but way too early.
Sure but “be second” doesn’t help that first mover. What incentive is there to innovate if your product is doomed to fail? What can a company do to both innovate and develop a viable product?
Are the corporate structures and cultures necessary for this just that different?
What do you mean "modern"? I'm using iPhones since 4S and I don't think that Music or iBooks workflow changed, it's largely the same. So probably Steve Jobs was OK with that.
Um, no? Apple Music wasn't even a thing in the iPhone 4S timeframe. You used to buy music in the iTunes Store, and play it in the music player app.
It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately.
Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab.
Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so you have to find this little corner thing and scroll down, wading through all the ads for the new apps you haven't installed.
Books always had a store, but your library was primary. You managed it; it had books that you'd bought, not empty placeholders for books you hadn't bought. There was a store, but it was the second tab.
Now the store is the main tab, and your library is the second tab.
And, as I said, they've now started reorganizing my library, adding "empty placeholder" books in. I don't see Enders Game in my library any more; I see the Ender Series, and if I click on that, I see all five titles, the first of which I can actually read (since that's the only one I bought).
If I honestly thought Android would be any different, I might consider jumping ship.
The thing about Android is that it lets you install apps (for now). In my opinion, that's the killer feature (for now). If you don't like how Google's music app works... install something else. If you want something Google won't allow in their play store... download it somewhere else and install it.
Yes, it still has a billion things wrong with it, including not being able to uninstall the shovelware, and not being able to modify the OS, and I'd rather have a third choice better than both these two.
> If I honestly thought Android would be any different
I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android. All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB) organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android tablet, phone and a generic cloud backup folder with SyncThing. I don't subscribe to any media service (and never have).
My music library/player is PowerAmp, my ebook reader is the open source KOReader and my podcast app is Podcast Addict. None of them has a store and they are all free (although I did upgrade to the plus version of PowerAmp to support the developer). They all get regular updates, are highly customizable and have every feature I want or can imagine wanting. My browser is Android Firefox with uBlock Origin so I don't see any ads and for YouTube I side-loaded Revanced Extended from the open F-Droid store, which is a clone of the YouTube app with no ads and all dark patterns removed. I also run a side-loaded open-source DNS-level ad blocker for the occasional social media app.
My phone is a Samsung Galaxy Note 20 that still works great (I did replace the original battery last year which took ~20 mins). I'm using a five year old phone not because I'm cost conscious, I'd happily pay >$1,500 for a new phone and I keep looking at new models every year but never see anything that would be a noticeable improvement for my usage. Really... I swear I'm NOT trying to be @SimpleLife or minimalist/retro, I have a significant yearly budget for discretionary toys, but some years I struggle to spend it all because I'm also allergic to things that are constantly low-grade annoying or that I can't customize to my prefs. I just refuse to adopt anything that wants to own me instead of me owning it.
I haven’t used an android device in 2 years, but I was just like you for almost a decade. At some point I got tired of all the micro-annoyances that I had with android and my oneplus phones (my last one was the oneplus 7T), such as awful brightness sensor, terrible compass, suboptimal gps, and low quality vibration engine. All stuff that you’ll never hear about in an actual review, for some reason.
My music player is an app called “Music”, and my ebook reader is an app called “Books”. I have spent exactly zero seconds looking for these apps since they’re already included with the phone, and are not developed by an unknown hero that could be hit by a bus at any moment. On books I read books that I bought from the iTunes Store, and epubs or pdfs that I downloaded online. I can access the epub files of both my own and the store-bought stuff from my mac’s filesystem. Everything is fully synced to all of my other devices through iCloud, a service which I’ve spent zero minutes setting up and zero minutes maintaining. These apps have all features I need, since all I want them to do is open my files and keep track of progress. They’re not customizable and I don’t care about it. I could download open source apps from the App Store or alt-store if I wanted to.
I pay 3 euros/month for my cloud storage. It works and I haven’t had problems with it. I share it with some family members. My browser is safari with uBlock origin lite. Admittedly I had to spend some time looking for a decent ad blocker, it’s not as easy as android.
I’m also not trying to live a minimalist or retro life, although I appreciate the ideology. My main philosophy right now is just that my phone is a tool through which I read books and listen to music (among other things). It has some limitations, but they’re not important. I don’t want to have to think about setting up a media server to listen to music, or figuring out syncthing settings once again because it’s been 3 years since I last set it up and it now broke all of a sudden. I just want to not have to think about this and get on to more important aspects of life.
I do it similar to you, except that I use PlexAmp for my music.
But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g., Spotify).
That said, though, at least we have this option. But is there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is available to them as well.
My understanding is that Firefox on iOS is substantially limited from Windows and Android. Like they can only run uBlock Origin Lite and many add-ons aren't available. Something about Apple policy blocking browser extensions that can run scripts/code, as it might compete with Apple's app store. But that's just what I've read online from other people. It also might be somewhat different recently in the EU, at least about the installing alt app stores. As I said, I haven't used an iOS device in over a decade, so have no first hand knowledge.
I'm sure the SD thing works for you but some people need music discovery and open source options are lacking there. When you can set up a radio station backed by RED/Lidarr and not have your account go on ratio watch in hours, then we'll talk..
I'm pretty sure that PlexAmp, backed by Plex Media Server, is the pinnacle of music discovery, within whatever you've got in your library. I've got that serving an enormous library that I've compiled through my whole life, but there's no reason (well, other than legalities) you couldn't feed this through the *arrs.
The discovery algorithm works based on fundamental metadata, additional data pulled from Last.fm (e.g., "related artists" and "popular tracks"), as well as its own acoustic matching algorithm.
This arrangement obviates the SD card, and also any other external syncing (PlexAmp plays live from the server, or has its own scheme for downloading to a local cache).
I guess that gets to what each of us means by "discovery". I think you're talking about the existence of a given artist/track. But for me, with a sufficiently large library, it can be difficult to remember what you have, and what would go well in a given context. So PlexAmp's "discovery" helps me to navigate through that large library to find and re-experience stuff I'd forgotten about or overlooked.
On my case that is achieved by getting down to the local record store, radio, whatever comes up in YouTube algorithms, somehow I get more music than I can manage to listen to.
The Music app on iPhones went from simple and usable to an absolute dumpster fire pushing a subscription. Even with a subscription it's incredibly maddening because of the terrible UX and show-stopping bugs (Literally failing at playing music!).
The Library tab is now the last one, with the rest (Which are lazy-loaded and slow!) are pushing content much of which is locked behind a subscription. It's now even worse with iOS 26 since tabs get groups and requires 2 taps to into my own library.
The Music app has been getting worse and worse every year.
My favorite "bug" was when that dumb thing refused to play because I forgot to stop playing music on my Mac for whatever reason (sometimes the play was actually stopped, it was just unable to resolve state).
Spotify has other issues, but at least as a streaming player, it is smart enough to tell me when there is something playing somewhere else and it even allows me to keep playing while just switching the output.
If at least they had kept it as a good app to manage local music, but even that has regressed. Don't get me started on suboptimal use of space.
I have a hard time following the Apple advocates, it has become quite bad for the price you pay, there is really no other conclusion that is reasonable.
YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on the Music app, without being interrupted asking if I want Apple Music. I open up the Books app to read Winnie the Pooh to my son, and the opening screen has loads of random trashy romances to try to sell me. I go to comfort read Ender's Game, which I did buy though the store a decade ago, and it helpfully "groups" it with the other four (!?) books in that series which I haven't bought, as if to say, "Don't you want to buy these too?" NO! If I want to buy them, I know where to find them!
It is SUCH an unpleasant experience. EVERY time I open the App Store to update some apps, I'm angry that I have to wander past advertising assaults to do it. EVERY time I open the music app to play an old favorite, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault. EVERY time I open up the book app, I'm angry that I have to go past the advertising assault.
I very much doubt the execs understand how much they're damaging the brand for that little bit of extra revenue. The see the extra revenue, but they don't see the lost brand, or the people that switch away. Is it really worth it?
ETA: I don't think it's an exaggeration to say:
Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.
Modern iPhones don't come with an e-book app. They come with a book store that you happen to be able to upload some of your own books into. But it's not structured to help you organize and read your books -- even the ones you've bought; it's structured to sell you more books.