Apple Keynote now showing ads in its UI

130 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by jervant

128 Comments

Joeri

2 hours ago

I still don’t get why apple chooses to devalue their brand so much for so little additional revenue. They’re a luxury goods brand, their whole revenue model is based on the appearance of quality.

mig39

2 hours ago

They're a premium brand, not a luxury brand. That's an important distinction.

Dell, HP, etc. all have premium products as well as their economy ones. Apple just doesn't do cheap and economy products.

When that gold plated Apple Watch came out, you could feel the discomfort. That's luxury brand territory.

Even the most expensive Apple Watch isn't in that "luxury" category anymore.

gumby271

an hour ago

Which is why the fitness and (for the apple watch ultra) more extreme and expensive sports like mountain climbing and diving are featured. You get the luxury class of people without looking out of touch with the premium class of people.

kridsdale1

an hour ago

Somebody listened to the Acquired episode on LVMH!

andykellr

an hour ago

This happens in Apple News and it's really sad to see. All of the ads are terrible:

* junk hearing aids that appear to produce a strange glow in the users ear * lead generation ads with clickbait statements (looking right now at "Senior Drivers in Your State With No DUI Should Read This") * "Motley fool issues first-ever 9x buy alert" (wow first ever!) * "Little-known Roth conversion strategy allowed by IRS"

I've never intentionally clicked on an ad in Apple News.

This is a service I pay for and these ads are insulting.

How much revenue are they producing relative to my subscription fees? Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.

alt227

39 minutes ago

> Why can't I pay an extra $1/month to turn them off completely.

Becasue they are making much more than $1 per month on selling targetted ads using your highly personalised and accurate ad profile.

lowbloodsugar

13 minutes ago

Apple News is almost entirely ads masquerading as articles.

_ks3e

an hour ago

The people running subscription services within Apple may be measured on metrics (subscriber count/growth) that may not be aligned with the long-term interests of the company as a whole, especially since brand value and the effect of software advertising on hardware sales are hard to quantify.

wolvoleo

an hour ago

I think for luxury brands advertising is even more important. Because they need to justify the inflated value of their brand.

Consider a Ferrari or a Rolex. It's not as much value for money as a cheap car or watch. There's some workmanship sure but most of the increased cost is just perceived value. People buy them because they are expensive, so they can show they have money. That only works if everyone knows it is expensive and the product has a good name.

Cheap stuff sells anyway because people need it and it is the best value for money.

spinningslate

an hour ago

True. But that’s advertising the product, not advertising in the product. It’s the latter that’s happening here. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands on a Ferrari, starting it up, and … finding an ad on the touch screen.

jedbrooke

an hour ago

maybe I’m just jaded at this point but I wouldn’t be surprised if Ferrari did have pop up ads on the screens in their cars

threatofrain

an hour ago

Apple enlisted Hermes to try and convince watch people that they understand luxury. The leather wrist strap costs as much as a new Apple Watch. As another noted here, premium vs luxury can be quite a step.

f6v

2 hours ago

> They’re a luxury goods brand

How so? Just about any major manufacturer has hardware in the same price range.

wolvoleo

38 minutes ago

Because most major manufacturers have hardware in a much lower price range than Apple does.

Everyone has a high-end but Apple doesn't even bother with the low-end.

IncreasePosts

an hour ago

If it was random products, it might devalue the brand(or at least the app itself), but its clearly just advertising a more powerful product from apple for doing something similar, if you can't do what you want with the given app.

Why they do it? Probably whoever is leading the creator studio team has convinced their boss that they could pump up their numbers by putting this ad in...

HumblyTossed

2 hours ago

>They’re a luxury goods brand,

Or maybe they aren't. They make great devices. I use them. I don't think of them as a luxury though.

spinningslate

2 hours ago

Even if they’re not:

> They make great devices

They make great hardware. They used to make great devices - but a great device needs the whole user experience to be great. Ad-ridden UI does not make for a great device. Doesn’t matter if it’s first or 3rd party ads.

It’s a great shame. Apple used to be the design standard to aspire to. Now it seems to have embraced enshitification. All because the market needs that share price to keep growing. And lacking leadership good enough to find another way.

lenerdenator

2 hours ago

They are in business to make money. Brand value and quality are far more nebulous as indicators of value than, say, "We got Brand X to pay us $Y for an ad campaign that will sit in Keynote for the next Z days and will book that revenue on the quarterly results".

The days of leaving revenue opportunities unexploited for some high-minded set of principles or intangibles are over. Line must go up, and population growth in many major markets is flat. When you can't sell to more customers, you have to squeeze the revenue out of the opportunities you do have.

kps

an hour ago

Customers' desires are a nuisance, but if you ignore them long enough they go away.

lenerdenator

a minute ago

If you mean "customers go elsewhere", do they? Where else is there to go? Microsoft and Google do even more tracking and advertising than Apple.

Linux doesn't have the same support in a lot of critical areas. It's better than it was, but it's still not close enough to be a real alternative.

kmfrk

3 minutes ago

I recently redeemed three months of free Apple TV+, and it drives me crazy to get a preroll of other TV+ movies and TV shows I couldn't care less about.

I like to think it's only going to be there while I'm freeloading on the three-month offer, but all I know is that I don't get this with Netflix.

hedora

an hour ago

My iPhone showed me an ad for apple pay (the nfc radio, not the credit card), which I regularly use.

Today, I started carrying cash, and switched back to using the NFC chips in my credit cards.

My iPhone 13 mini will probably be my last iOS device. Tap to pay was hard to setup in grapheneos the last time I checked.

I guess I won’t miss it after all.

whartung

an hour ago

Just tape your CC to the back of your phone, and your muscle memory will work the same.

wolvoleo

33 minutes ago

Don't you have to type a pin in the US if you make card payments above $75 or so? We do here in Europe. I don't with my mobile payments (tokenised) because I already authenticated to my own device.

This is a really big benefit for me to mobile/watch payments. I don't have to type my pin code on a device I may not trust. I use my biometrics so people don't get a chance to shoulder-surf my pin code. Also, I get a instant notification of how much I actually paid. I don't get that when using the card.

Seeing today's Ledger supply chain attack the concept of compromised payment terminals is a lot less academical now.

sdcfgy

2 hours ago

I have been exiting the Apple ecosystem for the last year. Feeling vindicated. It’s turning into the trash heap they were once proud not to be.

jiscariot

an hour ago

They are only ads when other apps do it, when apple does it they are "Enhanced UI Recommendations".

jpalawaga

2 hours ago

Apple is just as bad as Microsoft in this regard. They just won't leave their users alone.

runtime_terror

2 hours ago

You've got to be kidding? Microsoft has literal third party ads in the OS...

alt227

2 hours ago

Really? I havent seen them. Not saying they dont exist, but they havent been shoved down my throat.

spogbiper

an hour ago

I think they are only in the "home" version, so if you're using a business version of Windows you won't see them

alt227

an hour ago

I am using pro, so you are probably correct.

mig39

2 hours ago

They are literally in the start menu.

alt227

2 hours ago

ok, but I cant see them. They arent in mine, so maybe they arent ubiquitous?

slopinthebag

an hour ago

https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-pushes-start-menu-ads-t...

why would you lie about such an easy to check fact?

alt227

an hour ago

I think the sibling poster was probably correct. I have the pro version, and somebody mentioned the ads are in the home version which would make sense.

I said I never denied they were there, I just cant see them in my copy so its wrong to call them ubiquitous in Windows.

partiallypro

an hour ago

I don't have them either. So maybe you are just incorrectly making a broad assumption about Windows devices.

slopinthebag

an hour ago

i mean, both the article and my own experience with start menu ads on windows (which pushed me off the platform) seem to agree with me

LeFantome

2 hours ago

This is all very bad timing. Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks, it is the wrong time for proprietary software providers to start pissing off and exploiting all their users.

I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.

phoghed

2 hours ago

> Given that I can use AI to create completely alternative software stacks

No you can't. Someone can certainly burn a gorillion tokens to make a 3rd rate clone of Adobe suite that get's posted to HN as pre-alpha that fuels 1000 comments like this though.

alt227

an hour ago

That is what people can do right now, what will they be doing in 5-10 years.

alt227

2 hours ago

I wonder how long will it be until people use ai to start reverse engineering all Apples APIs and protocols so that they can make 3rd party open source apps which can use the fruity ecosystem from outside the wall.

lenerdenator

2 hours ago

> I could make a full macOS clone. I could fix all the little warts that bother me and break out of the walled garden where I want to. Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.

You could.

You very, very, very likely will not.

They know this and act accordingly.

thejazzman

2 hours ago

Linux + thousands of developers with AI agents is going to show otherwise this next decade. I think. I hope?

f6v

2 hours ago

Linux has millions of man-hours worth of code. Did it help Linux become a mainstream consumer platform?

alt227

36 minutes ago

However it did help Linux power approximately 70% of servers in the entire world.

f6v

2 hours ago

> I could make a full macOS clone

With like a million bucks worth of tokens? Sure.

> Then I can port it to whatever hardware I like.

I think you're missing a point here.

blackoil

an hour ago

That is cheap, that will be one or two senior engineers one year cost in Cupertino.

alt227

an hour ago

Thing is, only one person has to spend those tokens once then the world gets its clone.

imoverclocked

an hour ago

Maybe unpopular take but ... this isn't just any ad. It's a link to another related product in the ecosystem. Discoverability has always been difficult and there are so many features that remain largely unknown to users because of it.

The title makes it seem like I can purchase an ad and have some kind of ill-fitting content jumping around the screen, trying really hard for my attention. Instead I see an upgrade path from what is free and widely available to a potentially better product. I see this with open source projects too.

wolvoleo

an hour ago

It's still an ad though. It's just a context-targeted ad: You get it because you use this product and they want to upsell you. That you might want the product doesn't make it less of an ad. On the contrary. Discoverability is one the purposes of ads. Increasing perceived value is another one but not the only one.

It's the line of thinking that companies like Google tend to push. "All our tracking gives you ads for products you are more likely to want!". Well, yeah. Because those ads are more likely to convert to a sale they are more insidious in my view.

I always like it when I see ads for things that I absolutely do not want because it means they haven't figured me out properly. The few times I watch Amazon prime I tend to get car ads, and I hate cars, I'm never going to buy one. Or dodgy gambling website ones, I don't gamble at all, not even a lottery ticket. It means they don't know what I really want and the ad doesn't really put mental pressure on me to part with my money because it's irrelevant.

gumby271

an hour ago

The title makes it seem like Keynote is showing ads in the UI, and from the screenshot I see a button that if I press it, will accept my credit card so I can buy a thing.

Just because it's hard to discover things I don't yet own doesn't mean I want them shown to me while I'm making a slideshow.

Someone

an hour ago

Objectively, this isn’t much different from an app offering in-app purchases.

Subjectively, however it feels significantly different to me.

Reasons why that’s the case that I can think of are:

- it shows the offer even when users aren’t searching for the offered product?

- the product that is offered doesn’t signal “in-app purchase”?

- it doesn’t feel like Apple to do this in this way.

CharlesW

an hour ago

Also, I tried to reproduce this by updating to the latest Keynote and couldn't. Are we sure this is real and not just rage-bait?

imoverclocked

an hour ago

I just updated and see the same "ad" under New Document -> Choose a Theme.

wolvoleo

an hour ago

Maybe you already own Creator Studio so there is no need to show it to you?

charcircuit

an hour ago

It's not just related it's for getting the paid features of Keynote itself.

bromuro

an hour ago

Agree, not an ad. Title made it seem like the excessive ads we see in games or iphone apps.

cosmotic

an hour ago

It's hard for my eyes to look away from that liquid glass toolbar train wreck to even see the ad.

glimshe

2 hours ago

If you work at OpenAI, I want to let you know I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription today because you won't stop pestering me with upgrade offers/ads.

Go do that to your free users, not the ones paying your salary.

bigyabai

2 hours ago

If you work at OpenAI, congrats on getting people to subscribe in the first place. The marketing is working, OpenAI customers think they're safe from ads!

runtime_terror

2 hours ago

Pretty sure most people commenting here didn't even look at the post to see it's Apple promoting their own related product to their customers, not a third-party ad

sdcfgy

2 hours ago

Oh we’re well aware. There’s nothing cheaper than upsell nags when you spent what you did already.

bm5k

an hour ago

How much did you pay for keynote?

tombert

an hour ago

Considering you cannot run Keynote on non-Apple hardware, it cost "whatever the hardware cost".

gumby271

an hour ago

So I can start saying that Apple's software is ad-supported now?

lowbloodsugar

11 minutes ago

About $5000 for the Mac book it came on.

brink

an hour ago

The price is in the hardware.

alt227

2 hours ago

Ads are Ads, people hate to see them whatever they are advertising. Especially when they already paid a lot of money to join the ecosystem, upselling to paid customers feels cheap.

rationalist

2 hours ago

An unwanted distraction is an unwanted distraction.

add-sub-mul-div

an hour ago

Nobody uses that to excuse Microsoft showing OneDrive ads.

bigyabai

2 hours ago

Apple's own cross-promotions are so ugly and ham-fisted that I'm not sure third parties could do worse: https://www.pcmag.com/news/how-to-ditch-unsolicited-f1-ads-n...

phoghed

an hour ago

Yes they could, they would, and you know it. They'd be serving you malware, they'd look even worse, they'd be for scams, they'd sell all the data they harvest from you to 1000 other companies, etc.

bigyabai

an hour ago

I don't think they can. People expect third-party apps to sell them stuff, but not their OEM.

Apple used to differentiate themselves by not using their OEM apps for ad space. Now they're copying the exact same "curated" promotions style that made Windows packin apps intolerable.

phoghed

an hour ago

Yeh if we ignore all the reasons stated, they certainly can't I guess.

epistasis

2 hours ago

I looked, and I'm infuriated.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Apple avoided when it had strong management from Jobs. Now...

HumblyTossed

2 hours ago

Does that make any difference at all? When Windows does it, people pop a fuse, but Apple gets a pass?

Pffffff..

cwillu

an hour ago

Fanboys gonna fanboy; I'm reminded of the "switch to mac” parody animation by ubergeek from decades ago.

alt227

2 hours ago

Just before they release their first smart home device with a screen.

I wonder whats coming?

wolvoleo

an hour ago

Yeah someone made that point visually in the comments there too, quite aptly.

hurfdurf

an hour ago

Prominent screen in the kitchen used as recipe stand showing ingredients etc.? The possibilities are endless, and I think we're going to love it.

alt227

34 minutes ago

The possibilities certainly are endless. Every recipe you view has potential to sell you the ingredients, or maybe even full meal subscriptions like SimplyCook or HelloFresh if it detects you might not like cooking or be very good at it. Who knows what else you might look up on it which could be enhanced by selling you an extra service or two.

wolvoleo

an hour ago

Yes, we will own nothing and we will be happy

_doctor_love

2 hours ago

Apple stopped caring about quality quite a few years ago but those decisions are only hitting us now. The next few years are going to be very stupid.

If we are lucky, Apple can right the ship in time. I wouldn't hold me my breath though.

I miss Steve Jobs.

wat10000

2 hours ago

Apple has one of the most valuable brands in the world. Why do they want to associate it with this tasteless nickel-and-diming? If nothing else, surely this is bad for business over the long term. Gain a few low-value subscriptions, lose a few high-value hardware purchases.

wolvoleo

an hour ago

They do this exactly because they are such a valuable brand. Their customers are generally pretty well-off and thus a really highly desired target community: People with plenty of money to spend and who already proved they buy Apple products. This is the creme de la creme of advertising targets.

It's also why so many companies love to "partner" with Apple. Like the goldman sachs credit card, the new LG promotion with the homeview etc. Note that this comes hot on the heels of the LG "We own the glass" scandal. Yet Apple finds it more important to promote them. I'm sure LG pays Apple for this "partnership", not the other way around.

alt227

13 minutes ago

> I'm sure LG pays Apple for this "partnership", not the other way around.

Depends if Apple wants their shiny OLED panels, LG are a leader in manufacturing them.

mark_l_watson

2 hours ago

Another new annoyance: the Settings app has 2 red notification icons because Apple is trying to sell me extended AppleCare. Apparently no way to turn off these notifications.

kvuj

2 hours ago

I thought you could click on it, press no/cancel, and it would disappear.

wolvoleo

an hour ago

It does, and then it comes back a few days later as a friendly reminder to "continue setting up your iPad" as it does on my work one.

In my case it's not AppleCare but Apple Pay. Which is actually pretty useless on an iPad anyway but still it keeps pushing it to me and I've owned the thing for years and clicked the go away button many times.

mark_l_watson

2 hours ago

As of this morning, that does not work for me.

mrtesthah

2 hours ago

It's been doing this for years now to try to get me sign into iCloud. I finally gave up and signed into the free version, then disabled every single service.

hmry

2 hours ago

I remember seeing this back in January

rvz

2 hours ago

Don't like it? Vibe code your own Apple® Keynote® software.

whartung

an hour ago

No, the hot tip is to REA a patch to stop showing the ads, keep the rest.

phoghed

2 hours ago

From the title I imagined 3rd party ads, not an upsell for some feature of the app/platform.

Who tf uses keynote anyway lol

jflwiejrilewqj

2 hours ago

Apple has always been ultra-narcissistic, pushing designs and features that make their designers feel smart but actively hurt customers and decrease the utility of their products. Now they're even losing that. They ran out of good ideas shortly after Jobs died. Now they've run out of bad ideas and they're speed-running enshittification.

seam_carver

2 hours ago

I still use the old version of Keynote for this reason.

sidcool

an hour ago

Are we too sensitive? It's their own product

hightrix

an hour ago

No. Ad-hate is justified regardless of the product being sold or the platform presenting the ads.

Ads ruin everything.

neuropacabra

an hour ago

I don’t like OneDrive ads from the same reason. They are still ads in a product that should be ads free.

scoresby

an hour ago

If you also agree that people were too sensitive dragging Microsoft then yah, we are getting too sensitive

alt227

an hour ago

Upselling your own paid customers is cheap. You already took their money, make them feel valued not like you just want to squeeze them for more.

bigstrat2003

an hour ago

Ads are annoying whether it's for third party products or not.

slopinthebag

2 hours ago

they've been showing ads for years. literally every year i get an ad for the new version of the os. heck sometimes they show popups advertising security updates. apple has no shame.

dzogchen

2 hours ago

Time to vibe code an OG Keynote clome...

charcircuit

an hour ago

Keynote showing an upsell for the premium version of Keynote is not an ad.

wolvoleo

an hour ago

How is upselling not commercial promotion?

charcircuit

an hour ago

What do you think the selling part of upselling is referring to. It is for commercial promotion.

lowbloodsugar

9 minutes ago

Your argument is “It’s not an ad, it’s a commercial promotion”?

wolvoleo

an hour ago

I know, but I'm referring to the "not an ad" part. Ads are literally commercial promotion.

classified

2 hours ago

Apparently I made the jump to Linux just in time. They are just your run-of-the-mill enshittifying Rent® Seeking© Optimizer™ now.

sdcfgy

2 hours ago

Yeah same here. I decided to use 5/6 year old trash PCs running Debian. They work absolutely fine. I think I’m actually more productive and certainly less distracted and less broke.

My entire desktop setup was bought with the cash left over from selling my 10th gen iPad. And I got a Xeon E 2276G, 32Gb of ECC RAM and 1TB enterprise SSD for that.

phoghed

an hour ago

> now

Serivces have been a huge (and growing) chunk of their revenue for a long time

Archesilas

2 hours ago

I’d like to switch to Linux, but I can't find a sufficiently functional alternative to Keynote, which I need every day for my work. It’s a shame.

tombert

40 minutes ago

Genuine question: what does Keynote do that PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress doesn't? I'm a bit out of the loop and just use Typst for presentations now, but I'm not suggesting it as an alternative to Keynote for anyone who doesn't mind a compilation step.

If PowerPoint is sufficient, it (mostly) works on Linux now: https://github.com/Tombert/office365_flake

hedora

an hour ago

Claude, make me a latex presentation on <topic> filled in with this outline.

If you don’t know what latex is, substitute “html”.

Similarly, the choice of LLM is unimportant.

dlivingston

2 hours ago

Well, given that AI can now decompile and port software... :)

avgDev

2 hours ago

I still feel like iPhones are good devices, but yeah apple is going down hill.

I also get a lot of life out of MacBooks, they have been pretty reliable for me.

hedora

an hour ago

They stopped releasing phone sized devices 5 years ago.

Never forget.

bm5k

an hour ago

It's ever so slightly disingenuous to call this "showing ads": It appears to be letting you know about a paid DLC for the app you are running not "this space is for sale".

That said, I don't think it's even a slippery slope from here to "this space for sale".

alt227

14 minutes ago

As other people have said, if this was Microsoft trying to sell you a onedrive subscription would you feel the same?

hedora

an hour ago

So, an ad for DLC is not an ad?