Apple Lays Off Around 100 Services Staff Across Apple Books and News

[RevTEG]

News like this makes me more hesitant to buy via Apple Books. Over the years I stopped buying Kindle books and moved my purchases to Apple Books. Nothing against Kindle, I just prefer the look and organization of Apple Books better. I don’t like having books between multiple apps. 😅

 

[jwolf6589]

Again, hope that works for you. Without an authorization key from the server, I doubt they are accessible, but I don't know for sure.

I have been able to download books after I moved to a new device that have been removed from the store. Also you have no clue what Apple will do with books. I know our society is going more and more stupid thanks to computers. People don’t use their brains like they used to. I worked in retail nearly 30 years ago and I had to manually memorize places and items. Kids these days are so glued to their phone I get often frustrated and angry when I ask for help. Never was this way in my day.

People do not read books like they used too so I won’t reward stupidity.

 

[jwolf6589]

News like this makes me more hesitant to buy via Apple Books. Over the years I stopped buying Kindle books and moved my purchases to Apple Books. Nothing against Kindle, I just prefer the look and organization of Apple Books better. I don’t like having books between multiple apps. 😅

Same. Apple Books and print.

 

[platinumaqua]

I like Apple Books. It's easy to set up an account to buy books only available in another country whereas Amazon geolocks the content to the country. Plus it's pay once read many and available to read offline by default like the iTunes Store.

As for Apple News, so much ads in the app and is a subscription model which I don't like so I ignore it.

 

[unregbaron]

Apple News is one of the more un-Apple products: if you block a channel you just see greyed out panels and you still see ads even if you pay. The Libby app offers many more magazines and is free.

 

[stephenschimpf]

People have trouble getting through books I think because social media has killed our attention spans.

But I think AI will help people get through books soon, so I think people will read more. Imagine being able to ask Apple Intelligence "Sum up this page for me" and ChatGPT breaks down the page to help get you on track. You can already screenshot the page and manually upload it to ChatGPT to do this, but once it's easier and catches on I think more people will be doing it.

Yikes. Unfortunately, I think some young people might eventually confuse doing this with actually reading. In the words of Saul Goodman, "I weep for the future."

 

[Zeke92]

Apple Books could have been so much more with apples hardware and software, but has been abandoned for a long while now.

Also seems mad they never bothered with an audible conpetitor

What does audible do that Apple Books already doesn't do? You can download audiobooks from the app can't you?

 

[Analog Kid]

Lower head count = higher profit margin = bigger executive bonuses.

^^ This is all they care about anymore

Tim, please feel free to retire

🤣 100 people, out of 161,000, 0.06% of their workforce, were told to spend the next two months looking for another job within the company and you think this is going to be an executive payday?

I wonder if I'd find either of you saying "why are they working on X when they should be fixing Y" in your post history, or if you've always felt the company was focused exactly where they should be and Books should be Apple's highest priority.

 

[Sir_Macs_A_Lot]

My Apple devices tell me that I haven't used Books in years. I used to use it daily.

 

[czoli]

Hopefully Apple higher ups don't all get big raises because these poor folks lost their jobs .

Someone probably hit his PKR and will get a raise for the "optimisation", the executives responsible for it will hardly be touched, welcome to big corps politics.

 

[Jamie0003]

What does audible do that Apple Books already doesn't do? You can download audiobooks from the app can't you?

It’s a subscription service, it’s very different

 

[AeroEd]

AI will be replacing most of us in the next decade.

Finally the collapse of this barbaric capootalist system

 

[WarmWinterHat]

It’s a subscription service, it’s very different

Yes, but you keep what you buy from Audible. I jut use Libby if I (rarely) want to listen to audiobook over reading it. Free from my local library!

That's another reason for Apple books not being a hit, it's not just iBooks vs. Amazon. It's your local library (that lets you borrow ebooks, magazines and newspapers for free) vs iBooks vs Amazon.

 

[Cunir]

Apple Books could be so much more if they just put the effort in.
like giving you more control over the text sizing from book to book (and have it remember the settings from book to book! - it seems to have just one global setting for everything), and the margins as well

they need to redesign the whole comics experience, and make the panels cinematic like all the other comic apps do. Apple Books is the only one I've come across that just offers the plain page so you have to pinch and zoom all the panels.

 

[Lioness~]

Unfortunately I had almost forgotten that app - the Kindle app is my readinng app.
I recall however I did some effort some time ago to use the Books app. It was pretty ok to use on Mac's but worse on iPad's.
Too bad for Apple that they never made much effort in that department.

I would recommend Apple to make savings to use AI as a CEO, and fire Cook.
His calculations can't be difficult for an AI to replicate 🤑😉

 

[thebart]

Man all these tech layoffs suck. What's going up there in the Bay area

Apple doesn't have an eink device, which is how I and a lot of heavy readers prefer to read books. Books purchased from them can't be freed (DRM removed) so they can't be transferred to a non Apple device. They don't support Adobe DRM so they're not integrated with public libraries. I guess their user base is so huge and most don't care about these issues that it should be enough for Apple Books to be successful. But where they're not already the 800lb gorilla they don't seem to be good at or eager to compete

 

[Cunir]

I disagree that there is a better news curator than Apple news plus you get all the magazine subscriptions and you can pick any subject to get news curated. Cannot be beaten at any price and I don’t believe less than $15 is very expensive

Pressreader can do all of that for free if you put your library card number in... free newspapers, free magazines. It sounds mad but it's true.
It even has a section curating all the latest stories that you might want to read, using topics that you have chosen yourself, just like Apple News.
and there are no ads all over the place

 

[pdaholic]

I like acquiring books much more through the Apple bookstore, but it is often the case that the same book is cheaper in the kindle app. That’s gotta hurt Apple Books.

 

[CoMoMacUser]

New York Times for one, wall street journal, The Guardian (U.K.) for another two. basically the money wasn’t that good and Apple didn’t let newspapers have access to subscriber information by the sounds of it.

WSJ and the Guardian are still available in Apple News+.

 

[sublunar]

WSJ and the Guardian are still available in Apple News+.

Looks like there was recently a U-turn by The Guardian.

The landscape is constantly changing and I notice some U.K. news websites are going behind a paywall that were not previously behind a paywall. It’s also been mentioned in this thread about people not paying for their news.

It’s not really progressive given the current state of the world as journalists etc all need to be paid and can’t continue to give away their work for free.

 

[Fat_Guy]

I suspect the layoff workers will get the opportunity to work in the services area. Apple ain’t poor…

 

[richpjr]

🤣 100 people, out of 161,000, 0.06% of their workforce, were told to spend the next two months looking for another job within the company and you think this is going to be an executive payday?

I wonder if I'd find either of you saying "why are they working on X when they should be fixing Y" in your post history, or if you've always felt the company was focused exactly where they should be and Books should be Apple's highest priority.

Yes, I realize that 100 people is a minute spec in Apple's headcount. However...

Speaking as someone who has years of experience as a senior VP and who has sat in many meetings talking about headcount and what it does to the bottom line, I can assure you it regularly happens that upper management (and particularly C level executives) worry about that bottom line and how it impacts their hefty bonuses.

 

[farmboy]

I have a lot of books in Apple Books. I think the app has become quite bizarre in the way it operates and the visual cues and menu options as well. I tried to remove books that were no longer of interest to me, and I was confronted with the following options: "delete", "remove from collection"(um, what collection?), " remove download", "hide download", and more. I click one book and get "Delete" when I click the Trash Can. OK, good. Next book "remove from collection", no option to simply delete, book purchased the same way as the previous one deleted. Next book "hide download" no option to delete. If you click on a group of books from the same author, you may or may not get all the books in that group to try to delete.

What the hell. Further, when you stop editing and click for instance "All books" from the left column...the deleted books are all still there. And for some reason long since read/deleted/hidden books become seemingly randomly listed as "New". Really?

This thing is just a complete mess. And good luck just trying to get a list of unread books. How hard is that to do for an app coder when the app wants to track everything else?

Layoffs for these folks may not be undeserved, as much as I hate to see it.

 

[victorvictoria]

Your example is not valid because those involved in the buggy cart business would have been able to move over to it's replacement (automobiles). Now just where exactly are people going to go when AI takes over their job? There is nothing physical with AI because it's all digital code. Re-skill you say? and who is going to pay for re-skilling ten's of thousands of workers who will have lost their job to AI. Robots have taken over manufacturing, AI will have taken over move human involved labour. Where will the jobs come from? Not everyone want's to work in the retail sector or is that the price people are going to have to pay for losing their jobs to AI, being forced to do a job they do not like because that is the only job available. Companies worldwide have already scaled back their training programs because it has become to costly. It paints a bleak picture of what is to become when AI becomes the def-facto choice between human or computer.

You just recycled the same old trope about every advance since the industrial revolution costing "millions" or "tens of millions" of jobs. Funny how living standards have steadily improved since that era began, and improved even more with the nascience of the technological revolution. And I refuse to believe, in the absence of any empirical data, that the Artificial Intelligence revolution won't have the same effect.

Your bleak prophecy belongs on a sandwich sign carried by wearing with a dirty robe, worn-out sandals, dishevelled facial and head hair, reading, "The End Is Near! Repent!"

 

[Chungry]

First thing I delete with a new device is most of the Apple apps such as Books, News, iLife stuff etc. I just load books into my boox and go on with my day. I prefer e-ink without the limitations and degraded experience of using my phone (notifications and whatnot). Plus my brain processes e-ink differently than a screen constantly refreshing.
Sad to hear people losing their jobs but the writing has been on the wall for quite some time. I don’t know many people that use books (or Apple News but that’s not here or there).