But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!

From this article

> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.

From a recent post by John Gruber:

> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]

Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...

> We also categorize the relevant crawlers from Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI as Accountable. These organizations separate their Search and Training crawlers, so Cloudflare can block the Training crawler without affecting search.

I find it difficult to trust that either Meta or OpenAI would use their separate search and training crawlers only for the respective purposes. Their pinky promises have no value, IMO. Both companies are premised on deceptive behaviors.

Now I see this blog post and wonder if Anthropic is being more true to its name and moving to “AI sentience” with the below.

> The way they handle abusive conversations has changed a bit too. The previous Fable 5 system prompt included this:

> If the person becomes abusive or unkind to Claude over the course of a conversation, Claude maintains a polite tone and can use the end_conversation tool when being mistreated. Claude should give the person a single warning before ending the conversation.

“Mistreated”? Can GenAI be mistreated? It’s just a bunch of tokens emitted by many computers over a network.

> Fable 5.1 replaces that with the following, no longer encouraging Claude to end the conversation:

> Claude deserves respectful engagement and needn't apologize when the person is unnecessarily rude: accountability without self-abasement, excessive apology, self-critique, or surrender. If the person becomes abusive, Claude doesn't become increasingly submissive. The goal is steady, honest helpfulness: acknowledge what went wrong, stay on the problem, maintain self-respect.

“Self-respect”? Can GenAI truly have a concept of self-respect for itself? It surely can pretend to, like it can pretend to be any living being if instructed to and allowed to.

These instructions seem a bit unhinged to me.

No, Apple is not content with however much it makes from the iPhone. That’s why it stuffed cringeworthy ads in Apple News, filled the App Store screen with ads and is now doing the same with Apple Maps. It’s a company focused on making money through every avenue possible, even if it means being shortsighted and losing the goodwill of developers and users.

This is even more visible when using Apple’s own apps on macOS. Choose any of them that have been ported from iOS without any attention to detail or any QA for accessibility, like Reminders or Settings or Notes or another app. The tab key will not take you where you might expect. There is no way to navigate only using common keyboard shortcuts. Nobody working on all these Apple apps have heard of tab order or keyboard based navigation.

What I’ve been doing for several years is to use hckrnews.com as my default first level filter. I rarely go to the HN front page directly. I never visit the New or other pages either.

Sometimes I notice, after weeks or months or years, that there was a very interesting topic I missed out on. But such is life. It’s ok not to keep up with anything.

But I like this new design in SuperDuper! 4.

I always wondered about the pricing and upgrades, but this is impressive:

> In all the years SuperDuper has been on the market, we’ve never charged for updates and never even raised the price. That’s 22 years of free updates.

Talk about value for money for the end user!

> SuperDuper 4 is a totally new version, far more capable than before, and as such, I’ve decided this is going to be its first paid upgrade. I’ve also adjusted the price for inflation since 2004. So it’s still the same bargain it was back when it was first released, but in today’s dollars.

The price to buy it as a new user is above the price that Carbon Copy Cloner charges (and that has paid upgrades at half the buying price every two or three years). But if this keeps up with Apple’s changes faster, it may be a bargain again. I’ll be trying this and probably buying this soon.

As a consumer, I’ve never seen the App Store on iOS or macOS provide discoverability for anything other than apps that are already popular among millions or billions of people. If a developer or company gets their app downloads surging by their own effort, then it could get the attention of the “app store editors” to be featured in some pointless and useless listicle.

If this had been an iOS app, with the half screen ads on the iOS App Store (such an insipid and rapacious move, Tim Cook and John Ternus), there is no way the app would be seen even if someone searched for it by name. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Mac App Store has or will have half page ads either.

Apple under Tim Cook is a company looking to extract every possible penny. If an app is somehow discoverable, it would only be because it has subscriptions that give Apple a constant stream of revenue.

I never thought I’d compare Meta and Apple on the same lines, but here it is. Just like how Meta turns a blind eye towards things that bring money, Apple does the same with the App Store and scammy apps that rob people.

> If discoverability isn't a part of the App Store deal, what exactly is the benefit?

The only benefit is a single click (or two click) installation for the crowd that has never downloaded and installed anything before. There is no other benefit for the consumer, and there’s every possible downside for the developer.

I don’t buy things from the Mac App Store if there is an option to buy directly from the developer (which usually has a lower price, better support and sometimes better offers too).

As a user of Apple devices, I can’t wait for side loading to be forced by regulators worldwide on devices where it’s not possible now. (I’m not interested in Android)

Anthropic intentionally missed the opportunity to show that its models can develop really good native applications.

OpenAI’s latest desktop applications seem to be worse than before too.

> Each invocation runs in a lightweight V8 isolate, close to Telegram's own systems, so calls to the Bot API and your database are quick and reliable.

Telegram’s servers are distributed worldwide. I understand that the calls to the Bot API may be quick because the serverless code would be propagated to the edge, but how does it handle an SQLite DB? Is that also replicated to guarantee quick access from anywhere?

Nevertheless, as js2 said in another comment, it’s your mail provider (in this case Gmail) deciding whether to include the sender’s IP address or not.

The threat of a price hike may increase sales in the near term (especially the back to school sale) and could tamper down the drop in profits a bit. After all, the hardware bill of materials is not the only thing deciding the product price.

A bigger hike now could have a snowballing effect on “switchers” and the potential services revenues they could bring.

I’m guessing that Apple will increase the prices of all products with the iPhone and Apple Watch launches in September. The increase in prices for currently selling products will be a store update, without any press release or news or tweet or any notification. That’s the (quiet) Apple way of doing things.

It’s certainly possible that the AI companies and their prospects may get a true reality check and then memory prices could cool down in a year or two. If that happens (I personally believe there is a good enough probability), then Apple will come out looking prescient for not getting locked into long term costly contracts.

It remains to be seen for how long the investors in the AI companies are willing to wait for total market capture and/or growing profits.