May 1, 2026

Ads in the OS…

*^{A classic print ad from Apple – remember print…?}*

There was a time when Apple’s advertising was almost nonexistent.

I recall opinion pieces in MacUser in the mid-1990s, complaining that Apple simply did not advertise effectively (or at all) and this was having an adverse effect on their market-share.

Although you could say the Apple’s ads now are top-notch (some of the TikTok advertising is very well done), Apple of the past always steered away from ads in the actual operating system.

Remembering the 90s again, Apple released an app called ‘Sherlock” which in addition to searching your local Mac, also searched the internet.

This app birthed the term “Sherlocking” as it effectively killed the third party app that had identical features, “Watson”.

At the time, Sherlock was not well received by some, stating loudly that there would be, “ads in the OS in a couple of years’.

Oh how the times have changed.

*^{Back when the web was a new & innocent place…}*

I remember at one of Job’s keynotes, probably mid 2000s, he surprised everyone by skipping over the financial summary that customarily occurred at the start by saying, “don’t worry, we’re doing fine”.

He then got on with the real business of the day, introducing actual hardware and the software that tied it all together.

Contrast that with the Apple of today; although they still introduce great hardware (the software is arguably not so great), there’s now another string to their bow -services.

Services are Cook’s baby.

When he first took over the reigns, he was eager (some say he was given no other option) to show Wall Street that they could create ongoing revenue and not just rely on a series of incredible, ground-breaking (but unsustainable) hardware announcements like the iPhone.

There was a serious amount of pressure on Apple at the time to show that they weren’t just a one-off iPhone making company.

Well Cook was successful – services is now a $100 billion (and growing) part of Apple.

It’s basically free money, takes minimal physical infrastructure, and Wall Street is now happy.

Although I don’t have too much of a problem with this where it supports a quality user experience (search licensing revenue from Google, AppleCare, iCloud, Apple TV+ and Apple Pay for instance), an insidious vein has crept in to this cash generating machine – advertising.

The potential issue with advertising revenue is that it is very easy to justify, difficult to refuse and all but impossible to switch off, once turned on.

Once you have ring-fenced your customers (in a walled garden let’s say), it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

They are easy prey for short-sighted financial managers to exploit and even easier for those said managers to justify in a board meeting.

This is where the problem lies.

Apple are increasingly measuring their success as a company, based upon how much cash they can generate.

No-one in a position of power can seriously deny an organisation (whose only measure of success is revenue), the chance to exploit a space in your eco-system where you could shove an ad.

No-one can stop it, because it’s not even a topic for discussion.

No one is going to win the argument, let alone raise the possibility, that Apple needs to stop doing something that increases revenue.

Whether or not this taints the brand doesn’t seem to be an argument that is being won, even though I’m sure they are having it internally.

So now we have ads in the App Store, advertising poor quality apps to users that don’t want them.
Apple News (whether you pay for it or not) has ridiculous click-bait ads like you see on low-traffic websites that are desperate for revenue.
Ads in Pages, Keynote and Numbers, trying to upsell a captive user for features that ought to be standard.
Ads in settings, to upsell you to Apple subscription services.
And now it’s creeping in to Apple Maps.

Ads are coming to iOS this summer, here’s what to expect.

Until someone at Apple grasps that this is tainting the user experience, I fear that there is no end to this.

Is the push to attract a new set of users (with the MacBook Neo), merely another promotion to ring-fence a new set of users to push advertising & services onto?

I hope not, but you can bet that very same opinion is discussed in the finance department at Apple.

The wrong people at Apple are winning the boardroom discussions concerning the financial exploitation of loyal customers.

It’s easy to win a a short-term argument for almost guaranteed revenue that comes from selling services to loyal users, than it is to win the argument that Apple needs to protect it’s brand, which created those loyal users in the first place.

I’m not alone with this view – in a recent podcast from ATP echoes my sentiment.

Siracusa stated that John Ternus should not let people pushing ads & services, dictate the future direction of Apple. ATP podcast: You Can Bend This Line.

Marco Arment’s letter to John Ternus follows a similar cry: A letter to John Ternus.

To quote the post:

We are customers and owners — not resources to be harvested, annoyed, or badgered into ever more services and upsells.

However I don’t think this will change anytime soon, with Ternus parroting the same services spiel as his predecessor:

John Ternus says Apple has so much opportunity to expand services.

I hope this is Ternus appeasing a twitchy Wall Street, (assuring them that their hungry, rapacious cash-generating services machine isn’t faltering) and not a continuation of this ruinous advertising path.

Let’s hope a change of leadership is also a change of focus on what makes Apple great.

April 19, 2026

Not all customers are worth pursuing…

MacRumors – Apple is Reportedly Facing a ‘Massive Dilemma’ With the MacBook Neo.

The existence of Apple’s MacBook Neo stems from a unique situation that Apple find themselves in – they have lots of binned chips that aren’t up to scratch for the iPhone, but are still very powerful and useful.

Chips that would otherwise stay in storage, are being used as the brains for Apple’s Neo.

The Neo uses the A18Pro chip currently and their plan was to use up this finite number of binned chips and then update that Neo when the A19Pro was released and further binned chips became available.

The potential problem with this whole approach is making sure that there are enough binned chips available to fulfil demand, and clear that chip stock just in time for the A19Pro chip to become available.

That takes meticulous planning & estimation of the demand of said product – and you have to get that right.

Because the number of chips is finite, the only variable you have to manipulate is price, and the key to setting the price right, is the research you do of the target market.

Well, it looks like Apple fell short in this regard.

The Apple Neo is selling very well – too well in fact – and they may run out of binned chip stock.

This creates a situation that Apple has not been in for many years (since the 1990’s John Sculley era) – customer demand, outstripping supply. Although it’s for different reasons – 90s Apple had too many sku’s and couldn’t anticipate demand effectively.

So the situation is different but the reason is the same – poor planning.

*^{They could not make those Mac’s fast enough…}*

A lot of pundits have dismissed this, assuming that Apple – the king of stock control – would not underestimate MacBook Neo demand.

But Apple is just people, just like Dell.

They are very passionate people, that work for a high-value brand, but they make mistakes just like everyone else does.

But this stellar demand could have been anticipated better.

For years, Apple have positioned themselves as a luxury brand that is just out of reach for the lower end of the market.

There’s a saying in Mac circles when you try to guess what the price of an upcoming Apple product would be:

“The price of – insert new product – will always be slightly more than you want to pay, but not too high, so that you’ll still buy it anyway.”

This creates a profile of an Apple customer that deliberately excludes some and embraces others.

They embrace a customer that is willing to pay more than they would for a PC, because the hardware and software quality creates a value proposition that makes sense to them, even though those that do not agree with this (the excluded), see it as expensive.

Apples approach creates this insatiable demand, now Apple have satiated this by reducing prices.

Apple should have anticipated this pent-up demand and because they have a finite number of chips, the only thing you can control is the price – and it should have clearly been higher.

Well, you can control the timing of the launch, probably the reason it wasn’t announced at the 50th anniversary celebrations was to manage demand.

I feel that the Neo should have been £699 not £599. It would have sat more comfortably within Apple’s other products and it would have reduced demand, so that they wouldn’t be facing this chip shortfall.

The MacBook Neo’s price is so low that it is also making people question the cost of other items in Apple’s line up.

For instance how can Apple sell a laptop for £599 but still sell ‘not exactly market leading’ headphones for almost the same price?

I’m not saying that they should make those headphones cheaper – I’m saying they need to increase the quality, feature set and value of those headphones to justify the price, in light of the £599 MacBook Neo.

There’s a difference between ‘value’ and ‘cheap’ – something can be great value but still be expensive.

There are 3 broad statements you can make about brand positioning.

1 – If you sell your items or services cheap, then you are advertising to your customers that you don’t value them (as they are plentiful) and they don’t value your brand in return (because there’s plenty of stores selling cheap).

2 – If you sell your items or services expensively, but communicate the value, you will gain acceptance and loyalty from a smaller, core group of customers, that will grow over time.

3 – If you sell your items or services expensively, but fail in communicating the value, all of your customers will think you are price gouging them.

Apple tries to be the second of these three statements.

Selling items too cheaply makes Apple’s other more expensive products seem less value in comparison – venturing too close to the third statement.

But Apple will eventually get past this and learn from this miscalculation – hopefully looking at the bigger brand picture.

Apple needs to re-evaluate their brand promise and the cost of entry to that brand to make good on the explosive potential of the MacBook Neo.

At Apple’s heart is its brand – and it needs protecting from short term thinking inside Apple.

*^{In retrospect, this was a low-point in Apple’s history…}*

As I’ve said before in never liked the road that Apple took when Steve Jobs passed and Jony Ive was given the keys to the kingdom.

Without Jobs to keep his feet on the ground we saw Apple turn into what every Apple-critique said it was: a company selling overpriced, underpowered and under-featured trinkets for a group of gullible sheep who drank the kool-aid.

The discontinuance of the MacPro (and it’s stupidly expensive wheels) and Studio Display XDR, show that Apple is repositioning itself away from Jony’s ‘luxury trinkets’ market and back firmly into the ‘selling great value products that people want to own and use’ market.

The era of selling $700 wheels for the Mac Pro and a ridiculously over-engineered & expensive monitor stand are well and truly over, and that’s to be celebrated.

But in the journey away from that, they need to understand that they are not in a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.

Not all customers are worth pursuing, especially if those customers don’t align with your brand goals.

April 16, 2026

The case for iPod 2…

Gizmodo – The World is Basically Begging for another iPod

Nobody needs reminding of the impact that the iPod had on the world and the people in it.

When Apple announced that they had a new product to release back in 2001, they were just known as the company that made the Macintosh computer and its peripherals.

Indeed, leading up to the actual launch, Steve Jobs was at pain to point out that they had “a new product to announce and it’s not a Mac”, such was the brand image that Apple had back then and the desire for them to pull away from that.

Of course it was derided at launch.

The critics opined that it was too big, too expensive, too derivative, just too – Apple, after all, everyone had a MP3 players at that point they said.

But to say it ‘otherwise caught on’ was an understatement.

New models followed, a Windows version, the iTunes Music Store, more new models, a killer advertising campaign, the innovation seemed to have no end.

The rest of the market tried to keep up, but no-one could stop the avalanche.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime product: it filled every market niche with different priced models and it solved every problem you had with portable music players, if you listened to music – you had an iPod. Period.

But then Apple did it all again with the iPhone and the iPod just evaporated.

When Jobs announced the iPhone it was billed as ‘an iPod, a Phone, an internet communicator’.

It was clear that the iPod replacement had arrived, and the iPod was going away.

The next decade or so saw the iPhone’s meteoric rise – so great was it, it pulled other companies along for the ride.

Some faded (Blackberry, Sony), but some had a market opportunity given to them, Google, Samsung amongst many others saw explosive growth.

But no-one could have envisaged what mobile internet communicators would do to society.

“You will own nothing and you will be happy”…

Although they clearly do a lot of good, like any tool that’s used incorrectly, they cause a lot of damage as well.

Social media doomscrolling, AI slop, diminishing attention spans, the lack of privacy and the lack of ownership of the digital goods you have bought, all add up to a decidedly sad, depressed and disconnected world.

Despite the fact that we are all ‘connected’ we seem further apart than we have ever been.

The iPod is from an age before all of that.

You owned all your music and took it with you.

Nobody could track you, nobody could sell you anything, no apps, no poisonous social media apps draining your attention and nobody could take your music away from you.

“You owned everything and you were happy”…

That direction of thought and the realisation of how far we have fell, is feeding the increasing desire to get back to that reality – and the iPod seems to signify that, at least in part.

For a while now YouTube has been full of guides of how to keep your old iPod going.

New batteries, click wheels, screens and cases – there’s an entire ecosystem of spare parts in place, along with detailed how-to guides, ready to supply you with anything you need.

In addition to that, some talented individuals have added bluetooth support, allowing wireless earbuds to connect you to the songs you own.

So there’s certainly a market here, there’s also a desire for a product to fill a gap – so where is Apple?

To their credit, Apple have kept the ecosystem going – you can still connect your iPod to iTunes music (how long that lasts though is unclear), but that’s it unfortunately.

*^{Fully supported even on the new Mac’s – and the colour matches too…}*

The ideal time to do this – Apple’s 50th Anniversary – has sadly passed.

The iPods 25th anniversary is this October 23rd – so if they were gong to do this, that would be the ideal time.

To be clear, there’s zero indication that this will happen, but if it did, what could it look like?

Well looking at what the modding community is doing, I’d say that it needs to look like the standard 30gb iPod – which is arguably the iPod’s high water mark. (YMMV).

AirPod support is a no-brainer – so a H1 chip is mandatory.
The ability to stream directly from Apple Music – so a wi-fi and a C1 modem chip is needed.
The ability to also just play your own library of music – so a decent sized SSD is needed.
Plug in headphones cannot be missed – the community would demand it.
The scroll wheel must remain – it’s just too iconic.
Software – I’d stick with the Pico UI, it’s perfectly suited to the scroll wheel, although how the streaming music store works with that would need some development.

So I’d envisaged 2 models – one with a wifi chip and one with a wifi/celullar chip much like the Apple Watches.

Price – I reckon £399 – £499.

And finally, some way of customising it and making it your own – detachable, 3rd party back plates maybe?

Even if this was just a limited run to celebrate the 25th anniversary, I think that a relaunch of the iPod would signal to the market that Apple is still in touch with its customers and want to undo some of the negativity surrounding the mobile internet – the demon that it launched upon the world.

Thinking different if you will…

March 8, 2026

Hello Neo… (Again)…

The announcement of the MacBook Neo has rightly caused a lot of consternation in the media.

Apple have resurrected their “Hello” advertising campaign for a new audience, that audience being new, younger users.

Their advertising on TikTok and the general feel of the campaign confirms this – this Mac is for a Neo (Latin for new) group of users.

This harks back to the original 1984 Macintosh and later, when Apple sorely needed a shot in the arm for sales -the famous Bondi Blue iMac.

The Bondi Blue iMac and the Neo have a lot in common and come from the same customer desire.

Back when Apple was in serious financial trouble, they observed that a huge number of potential customers loved the Mac, maybe even used them at work, but just couldn’t afford the financial outlay.

So although the Bondi Blue iMac was many things, one of those things answered the question that Apple asked themselves:

“Look, this isn’t complicated – why don’t we just give the users what they want?”

The iMac was a great value, inexpensive (relatively), great looking PC – exactly what people wanted.

Apple kept their target market in mind throughout development and took tough feature decisions to keep it on track.

They succeeded – it sold like hot cakes and saved the company.

I feel that this new (Neo) MacBook answers a very similar customer question.

Apple are very popular – customers may have invested an iPhone, AirPods or other Apple products already but just can’t afford a Mac.

What can Apple do to put a Mac within their grasp?

I assume a test was devised to collect customer data, this being the Walmart MacBook.

This would have confirmed the market existed and was primed and ready.

Apple kept that target market in mind and did what was necessary, took tough feature decisions to keep it on track and the result is the MacBook Neo.

*^{Erm, is this a dig at the Windows logo do you think…?}*

Over the last decade or so, Apple increasingly alienated their customer base by arrogantly assuming that their customers would pay (and sometimes overpay) for quality.

What changed?

Well 2 things, Apple Silicon and Personnel.

Apple Silicon completely altered their mindset.

Too many times Apple would dismiss parts of the market, excusing themselves because they didn’t control the costs of whole hardware supply chain.

Now they do – they have control over everything so the reasons to not do this are now almost none existent.

Plus, Microsoft have completely dropped the ball with Windows 11, and they don’t seem to be course correcting either – Windows 12 will have even more AI embedded in it, exactly the opposite of what their users want.

This new Mac could not come at a better time – the ‘perfect storm’ if you will.

Personnel have started to change too.

A lot of the old-guard have left. Jony Ive, Alan Dye, John Giannandrea and Duncan Kerr for instance.

We are now seeing a different mindset dominating Apple: John Ternus, Jennifer Newstead, Molly Andersen and Stephen Lamay to name a few.

I don’t know how much of John Ternus’ influence created the MacBook Neo, but you would assume it’s his baby – he’s a VP hardware chief and he launched the product at the Apple ~~Event~~ Experience.

So much of Apple has been put right in the past (I’m looking at you butterfly keyboards), by people like Ternus simply saying, “look, this isn’t complicated – just give the users what they want”.

Since Jony Ive left, the MacBooks almost immediately changed, butterfly keyboard gone, and the ports added back in – this isn’t a coincidence.

I hope the this is a sign of things to come.

*^{There’s Johnny doing something, erm – with his hands…}*

This mindset needs to permeate through every Apple product, dial back the arrogance and start listening to their customers.

To be clear, I don’t mean every customer – it’s important to listen, but only listen to those customers who align with Apple’s overall brand goals.

Ternus really needs to look at the monitor situation next though, there is no way that the people involved with the MacBook Neo, had any involvement with the 2 monitors that Apple released.

Neither monitor answers any of the customer criticisms of the previous monitors.

Apple updated the Studio Display, changing everything, but the actual display.

They cancelled the XDR, and put every feature that people wanted in the Studio Display (better screen, higher refresh rate), in a more expensive version of it.

This is their arrogance rearing it’s ugly head again, not listening to their buying customer’s feedback and assuming people will just overpay for ‘their’ vision.

The MacBook Neo is hopefully a sea change in all of that – Ternus replacing Cook can’t come soon enough.

*^{Out with the old (sorry Tim) and in with the new…}*

February 14, 2026

It’s all about the Numbers (and Pages, Keynote etc)…

Apple has a market cap of $3.7 trillion.

Apples gross margins are 48.2%.

By all accounts (pun intended) they are doing very well.

But for me, there’s a worrying development happening at Apple.

As you’ve probably heard, Apple have got into the subscription bundling game with ‘Creator Studio’.

They’ve grouped together some apps and are selling you the entire suite for one subscription price.

That’s the following apps:

Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, MainStage, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Freeform and Content Hub all for £12.99 per month.

It’s incredible value, but this grouping doesn’t make sense.

Quite why the iWork apps are in with this bundle is a bit of a mystery as I wouldn’t say that they are ‘creative’ apps.

Unless Apple think that Pages is akin to InDesign? (Hint: it’s not).

Surely it would make more marketing sense to have a ‘creator studio suite’ and a ‘work studio suite’?

But I don’t think this development is a marketing department decision – it’s a finance department one.

*^{Go and be creative people with… Numbers?}*

On the surface it seems that these apps have a subscription value added to them because of the AI features they have, and when you use an AI feature, it costs Apple money, so having a dollar value attached to the app, keeps finance happy.

Because that’s all that seems to matter now at Apple – keeping finance happy.

Not their customers.

Apple used to have their customer front and centre.

Steve Jobs’ mantra was to “just keep making great products that our users will love and financial success will follow”.

I’m not sure when this mantra was flipped on its head but Apple’s main goal now is to just keep adding to that pile of cash they have, as quickly as possible, seemingly without end.

Those great products?

Well you could say they are still there, but they seem to happen by accident now, rather than by design.

But surely that’s ok?

Apple still makes those great products, they just do it with a sound financial footing – don’t they?

But there’s a point to be made here – Apple’s resources going forward are corralled by the money they cost and generate.

With this financial mindset, products are perceived to be a success only if they have a measurable profit centre attached to them.

Those that don’t, seemingly don’t have people, time or resources allocated to them and they wither and die.

Is this the reason why Tahoe was released full of bugs and seemingly untested – because it’s free?

Is the only way Apple can allocate resources to any given project (money, people, time) is when they are set up to generate revenue?

Now I’m not saying products shouldn’t make money, that’s a sure fire way of going bankrupt.

But the reason you get into a market is because you want to make a great product, not that you want to make money – that comes as a side effect of great products.

The measure of success for Apple is whether they make great products not whether they make the most money, so they can continue to add it to the pile they already have.

Money is a side effect of making a great product, the money doesn’t make it great.

Maybe I’m being unrealistic, in this modern age, financial success is everything.

But I’m reminded of something Steve Jobs once said back in 2000:

When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that validates my intelligence.

Apple has a market cap of $3.7 trillion.

Apples gross margins are 48.2%.

Surely Apple exists to do something more than just make money?

Surely they have succeeded in that?

Maybe without a visionary at the helm it’s all that’s left for them to do?

Maybe it’s time to succeed in something else.