nubus

Comparing print media to music is odd. The music industry never held any relation to buyers. You bought their music - end of transaction.
In print media the subscriber data, permissions, and advertising are gold. Apple won't provide any of those on News+. To media this is worse than iOS "Newsstand" which completely failed. Some (most?) magazines are not created for readers. They are created for advertisers to reach an audience. If the publisher can't prove that it finds that audience... then it won't sell the adverts. This is worse than plain WWW.

Music made the transition to digital by going from albums to the sale of singles through iTunes and plays through Spotify. News+ doesn't take print media from issues to stories. It doesn't let you easily mix stories across titles or issues. News+ also seems lacking on story search and reading recommendations between titles (if you liked this story then you might want to read - and offer reads of different lengths).

It just won't work until the media agree on a story format (like the music single), to switch from issue publishing to smaller content packages, to use dynamic advertising (old stories have value - but make sure the adverts are new), to adjust stories for the screen (not really needed for iPad), and for Apple to do story recommendation. All and more have to come together. News+ doesn't do that. It just bundles something that doesn't work into an all-you-can-eat buffet.

chasm said:

You're such a fan that you've forgotten the flowering of the Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Beats, and the Apple Watch among many other huge successes (and a handful of misses) over the past few years. 

Apple TV has failed to a degree where Apple TV+ is going to run on non-Apple hardware. Apple Music is a Spotify rip-off with some US celebrities hosting a few shows. Beats... was a success before Apple. Watch became a succes after Apple moved it from fashion to health.

On Mac hardware it seems Apple decided that we can't get affordable or usable devices. We can't get a dock (PowerBook Duo was the golden age), we can't get decent keyboards, no MagSafe, no Mac Pro at $2000, and we need to pay for Retina on all laptops - extra cost, more GPU, and less battery life. 

But the real problem is macOS / OS X. Yes, the UNIX engine is kind of new, but the concepts are all 1984. It is the 737 Max of computing. It doesn't help us navigate knowledge.

williamlondon said:

What I love are the comments begrudging a capitalist company making profit. 

The reality is that Apple has obviously hit on a spot (product feature/pricing) that gets people to release more cash for certain features they want. 

Sorry - Apple didn't hit the spot. Last year Apple failed to deliver AirPods on time. This year we got teased with two new products that won't be widely available for Christmas. Apple can't be surprised each and every year about the global #1 "capitalist event".

Recently Apple cut entry level pricing for iPad. The iPad Air 2 was 21% more expensive. Obviously Apple didn't really hit the spot with the old pricing. Could the same be true for features and price of their laptops? Absolutely. 17Q1 was about saturating the market. The next quarters will show.

And I did choose.

levi said:

Unlock AppStore with legislation? Not sure what you're referring to here but that would be an unprecedented overreach of gov't and incredibly anti-business - both of which unlikely under a Republican administration

Now... most of the world is not under Republican administration. EU is already after Google on this, and it would be easy for China to hit back at the US administration by going after Apple. Even stateside the App Store isn't safe. As of last week customers can target Apple for violating antitrust legislation.

This rant about why Apple selling a lot of phones should make Mac users happy... well... no. Selling phones is not going to improve the focus, features, or quality of macOS or the computers we use as our main tool for work. It is even worse than demanding for Newton users to be happy about the success Apple had after abandoning their platform.

Looking forward we should expect to see the App Store being unlocked by legislation. It will allow for Google to jump in and offer developers a shared app space for Android + iOS making it free for users to swap platforms like on Steam.

Will Apple stay on the current path by keeping the cold Metal-Thin design language from 2001? By removing every little touch of humanism from macOS? By having a CEO that is using every chance to break his own record for most frequent use of "thrilled" and "profound" in a keynote? And will we still care?