The eBooks app I haven't touched in many years, but Apple News was actually a great idea they executed on like garbage. Paying a premium price for content, only to have the articles marred up with horrible, ugly ads all over the place always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If I wasn't part of a friend's Apple One plan, I would never pay to look at those ads. They need to re-evaluate whether they care enough about that offering to keep it around, because the cheap garbage way it looks with all those ads is offensive. I'd be annoyed with it as a free product with how obnoxious the articles look.
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Apple Lays Off Around 100 Services Staff Across Apple Books and News
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"I think most of the extra pandemic money has been squeezed out of the economy and consumers are starting to reach a tipping point with credit card debt and inflation."
I think you're right. Most recipients of pandemic relief went out and spent it all on things they didn't need instead of using it to put food on the table or saving it, and now it's gone. Inflation has already stifled spending in various areas, such as fast food, consumer staples, housing, healthcare and insurance. And some of those providers have recently moved to lower prices. There are deals galore from McDonald's, Subway and Panera among others. Walmart & Costco have been holding the line while others increase prices, and are benefitting from that policy. But housing, healthcare and insurance remain stubbornly resistant to repricing, even increasing faster than inflation.
I see gasoline prices starting to come down as well. (WTI Crude oil is currently @ $74.74/barrel, way down from Mar. 2022, when it hit $115.77 and gasoline was at record highs.
I think you're right. Most recipients of pandemic relief went out and spent it all on things they didn't need instead of using it to put food on the table or saving it, and now it's gone. Inflation has already stifled spending in various areas, such as fast food, consumer staples, housing, healthcare and insurance. And some of those providers have recently moved to lower prices. There are deals galore from McDonald's, Subway and Panera among others. Walmart & Costco have been holding the line while others increase prices, and are benefitting from that policy. But housing, healthcare and insurance remain stubbornly resistant to repricing, even increasing faster than inflation.
I see gasoline prices starting to come down as well. (WTI Crude oil is currently @ $74.74/barrel, way down from Mar. 2022, when it hit $115.77 and gasoline was at record highs.
For a year now I'm looking at other services in case I had finally enough of Apple's pricing policies and stupid software decisions, and they only thing I haven't found a viable alternative to is Apple Books. It has it's nagging issues, but still better than anything I've tried. But I rarely spend money there so I guess that doesn't show up in metrics. Everything else I could migrate in a day and abandon ship.
I would just like them to put the old iBooks GUI back, and remove that horrendous UX experience that is Books.
I wanted to love Apple Books. The interface is a hot mess. The books are overpriced. No unlimited strategy. It killed itself…
I'm not sure why the pandemic money is still considered a factor, that was serval years ago now, and how much was it? I wasn't eligible and don't remember. I figure it was gone within a few months. Gasoline has dropped below $3/gallon here.
Not everything is a hit. The apple Book store is nothing special, has no exclusives, and aside from being handy, there is no reason to use it over other options.
Apple News just sucks, period. I block a particular topic/organization and it leaves an empty opaque square on the front page, instead of filling it in with something I do care about.. What the hell?
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Remember Ping under Steve Jobs? What what about the letter creator they used to make where you can get cards delivered to people through Apple. Funny how we forget some parts of the Steve Jobs era where things did end
The retiring and eventual deaths of the Baby Boomer generation is already having a major impact worldwide. At some point companies will need fewer employees to serve a smaller population. I think we’re seeing that in tech now as tech as reached maximum saturation for individual consumers and will probably shrink over the coming years. Tech is also a mature industry, meaning that a lot of tech jobs are more and more about maintenance and less about creating brand new things. We’re going to see the world go through massive economic changes in the coming years due to an aging population and none of us understand how dramatic these changes will be.
Couldn’t care less about Apple News.
Hoping (but not expecting) that the lackluster services revenue from Apple Books means they stop neutering the software (on both Mac and iOS) and give back power users the ability to effectively manage their own DRM-free ePubs and PDFs. The current Books app is a joke. (It’s so bad I’ve switched to Calibre.)
Wishing the best for these employees. No one deserves to lose their livelihood to make arbitrary numbers on a spreadsheet look better.
Hoping (but not expecting) that the lackluster services revenue from Apple Books means they stop neutering the software (on both Mac and iOS) and give back power users the ability to effectively manage their own DRM-free ePubs and PDFs. The current Books app is a joke. (It’s so bad I’ve switched to Calibre.)
Wishing the best for these employees. No one deserves to lose their livelihood to make arbitrary numbers on a spreadsheet look better.
Apple Books is plain unusable and useless. I even don't know why it exists.
That would explain yesterday's outages
iCloud Mail, iCloud Web Apps, Stocks, Game Center, TestFlight and Apple News Experiencing Outage [Update: Fixed]
Apple's iCloud Mail service and its iCloud Web Apps are currently experiencing an outage, according to Apple's System Status page. Impacted...
www.macrumors.com
I’ve been avoiding AI in my programming work until it got a little more mature. I started using it in the past month and it’s a fantastic tool that helps make programming faster and easier. It’s still not perfect, but it’s better than searching Google for answers to difficult problems.
However, as you say, I can see a day where this is going to replace workers. AI makes me, an individual programmer, much more efficient and able to write better, less buggy code. In a team of 10 I can see laying off 2-3 of those programmers with assistance from AI (it can’t replace programmers — yet). But if that stays true across the industry that’s nearly 1/3 of the workforce, which is massive. In 15 years I can see it replacing 50% or more. Things are going to change very, very quickly in the very near future for many industries.
I use the iBookstore a lot - but not because it's good, only because it's pretty much the only alternative to giving money to Bezos.
It is really bad though. Look at the "Read Now!" screen you always start with, it's 90% ads, and only 10% for books I bought and actually want to read. The "Measure the time you spend reading per day" gamification trash reeks so much of Timmy's Service Revenue, it's ridiculous.
They also never made the actual buying any better either. If you read serials, you'll still have to remember to search for the next book in the series every few weeks when it feels like it could have come out now. Why can't I just subscribe to it?
It is really bad though. Look at the "Read Now!" screen you always start with, it's 90% ads, and only 10% for books I bought and actually want to read. The "Measure the time you spend reading per day" gamification trash reeks so much of Timmy's Service Revenue, it's ridiculous.
They also never made the actual buying any better either. If you read serials, you'll still have to remember to search for the next book in the series every few weeks when it feels like it could have come out now. Why can't I just subscribe to it?
I’m sure adding this feature into the Apple One bundle would drive subscriptions
Books is a horrible app. Every day it deletes the book I'm reading and I have to download it again from iCloud.
Healthcare hiring is a lagging indicator. Half of the revenue comes from Medicare/Medicaid which is a given, but the other half, employer purchased insurance will start to show cracks in the next year or so as the layoffs continue.
Lower head count = higher profit margin = bigger executive bonuses.
It sounds like Apple is using Siri to review the book and deleting the books it doesn't like
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I would like to see Apple branch out by adding live updates of the MR forums for Apple News. lol
The rest of the Apple world can get their tech lives in order.