alt Hacker NewsImagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
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> lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (for the Kindle it was $20 one-time).
For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.
You mean like when I clicked this article? What an ad filled mess of a website.
Where would they go? Android? That's even more spammy and ad ridden. They sure aren't installing grapheneOS.
Is BMW still doing the $20/mo for heated seats or whatever? All these companies man… not everything needs to be recurring revenue ffs.
> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.