Product maturity, endless rumour reporting, and overly polished videos have me far less enthusiastic than I used to be.
But I will watch the keynote video within a day or two of the event. There’s one thing I really dislike, however, and that is scrolling any social media while it’s live. I’ll not name names, but we all here know the people concerned – a stream of hot takes and none of them with the full story available at the time.
My standard approach to learning about the event is:
Google does have an interesting record with their consumer products. They seem much slower to introduce changes to their commercial products (Workspace)
I was surprised when David Pierce said “one of the biggest things that killed Google Reader is that they lost the person who was in executive meetings who loved Google Reader”. It’s been gone nearly twelve years and I still miss GR.
Are you predicting Apple Reader? It’ll be just like Google Reader but it’ll look considerably more refined and, just occasionally, you won’t be able to get it to update your feeds for a week.
I don’t like refined, I like functional. A web based solution doesn’t have to be patched “every time” Apple or Microsoft makes a major change to their OS.
It’s been a fun ride but after 30 years Apple lost me as a paying customer in mid-February. So, no, I won’t be watching it. I’ll keep using the Apple hardware I already have until it no longer works. But my daily OS is Linux and I’ve moved most of my workflow over. I’m still popping in here and still follow a few Apple folk on Mastodon but beyond that I’m not going to be paying much attention to their announcements.
I was infected by the Apple bug almost 20 years ago: 2006. I have not missed a single keynote since then. I have watched all of them - most of them live (I have to point out that it very often is in the evening over here, so the perfect time to watch). I even enjoyed the reality distortion field in the past and I was looking forward to the developments that eventually did materialize. They took time, but they had been real.
Even without the Macworld article I have to say, I am not sure if I will watch it live or later. Why?
When I look at everything that didn’t come from the 2024 keynote, some of which turned out to be - and I’m being cautious here - more wishful thinking than a real product, then I ask myself what the point of watching the 2025 keynote is. I am not a developer. I don’t know if I personally see it as negatively as John Gruber (“Something Ist Rotten in the State of Cupertino”), but frankly, I don’t see it much more positively. The way I see it is that Apple can regain trust this year by showing over the course of 2025 and 2026 that their words are actually followed by actions/products/running software. If they deliver, it could be interesting and worthwhile to watch again in the future. As it was last year, it was just a waste of time for me personally - at least in retrospect.
We’re in a plateau era of technology at the moment. Other than the sugar rush of seeing what AI could do a couple of years back, no-one is producing new categories of product, or improving them in leaps and bounds. Phones have settled into a predicable form factor, same with tablets & computers. The most interesting thing we’ve had is probably Apple Silicon, which is cool and all, but not exaclty something you have to see the release promo for.
I think the golden era was probably about 1998 to about 2010, when we got the iMac, iPod, iTunes, MacBook, MacBook Air, Mac Mini, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV and probably some others I forgot. We were getting some major new product line every year. Since then though we’ve generally got some variation or update of the above.
I’ve probably tried Apple News+ four or five times since it was launched. And I’ve always canceled after a month or two. Like Apple TV+ there is not enough there that interests me enough to stay subscribed year round.
And the blinding advertisements, if you use dark mode, certainly doesn’t help. I prefer NetNewsWire.
I can’t do any aggressive reading on devices. I really wish Apple News+ was on something E-ink. Its a good service for the price but I just cant use it enough to justify the costs.
The Wall Street Journal is in Apple News, so it would be well worth the subscription for me if it worked. Things it can’t do?
Give me a list of all WSJ articles, sorted reverse-chronologically. I know about “Latest” - it misses sections, including opinion.
Give me the ability to search one publication, not all of Apple News.
Limit the WSJ view to articles I haven’t read yet (or a combo of unread + favorites).
Absent the above, at least show me the date of an article without clicking into it. Yes, I get it - it’s a News+ article. I’m PAYING for News+. Can I see the date that should be where the News+ text is?
This stuff is all table stakes for a news reader.
They assume that you just want to “dip into” the news, and you want them to tell you what’s important. For any workflow other than that, it’s absolute garbage.
I would pay $15/month for just the WSJ, but not the regular price of $39/mo. So I will continue to use Google to find the majority of any WSJ article I may be interested in reading.
Yeah, I can get just the stories from the WSJ. That’s not an issue. But then I’m stuck with an infinite scroller that, practically speaking, doesn’t have any dates on it. And it’s missing (at least) the opinion section.
Ah. It’s been a minute since I have used Apple News so didn’t consider that.
But the restrict to follow feed is by far and away the best thing about the app.However i wish there was an RSS component to it, there are some local sources that just do not exist there.
This might just be me being snarky, but I think it says something that the “best thing” about Apple News - which still has to be manually enabled - is the default behavior in pretty much every RSS reader in existence.
I’m playing with it again for a few days since they gave me (another) 3 months free, and it’s just little papercuts everywhere. WSJ puts all stories headlines in a typeface that’s hard to read at the tiny sizes in the “latest” view. Blowing it up helps somewhat, but not as much as replacing it with a sans-serif typeface would. And I have these “Special Coverage” sections I can’t get rid of - “Politics” and “Climate Change.”
The bottom line is that Apple News is fundamentally designed around the idea that Apple knows what you should be doing more than you do. Much like a number of Apple’s other services and hardware.
This was when I was beginning to rethink my relationship with Algorthims, discovered that feature on Apple news but had many other issues with it so I began searching for apps that have “timeline view”
