Making a free tier.
It’s never just a “free tier” unfortunately. Most times these headlines pop up, it’s “We’re increasing our base subscription cost, but don’t worry! You can keep paying the old price if you’re ok with ads.”
Paying for ads is a terrible idea companies have forced into the narrative, without users really caring.
I choose not to pay for ads.
I don’t know what makes you think this would be a “free tier”; it’d just in all likelihood be an even more enshittified, slightly-less-money-flushed-down-the-toilet-for-an-inferior-product tier. https://archive.ph/mwfWY
Content advertising isn’t “on brand” for Apple, so this would be a bold move.
I think we passed that point after the ads in the App Store,News app, Books app, and Music app.
Advertising in general has been a growing revenue stream for Apple from my understanding. That “anti-tracking” they added a few iOS versions back also conveniently increased Apple’s ad revenue because other advertisers didn’t get the same data that Apple would just have by default.
I’ve lost count of the volume of times I’ve been downvoted for stating that Apples transition to a services based company guaranteed they would become the enemy of every users privacy, regardless of all their virtue signaling about privacy.
Meanwhile, in the 2020’s you can not longer do offline dictation at all, on a several thousand dollar machine, without agreeing to sending PII and transcripts of all your dictations to Apple servers… You could do completely offline dictation a decade ago, on a machine that was about 1/10th as powerful.
Your daily reminder that by paying for streaming services, you’re receiving a worse product than the alternative.
I refuse to pay for any streaming services. I am in the 1% of consumers taking a stand, and have had zero impact in the trajectory of video streaming the entire god damn time.
Oh no! I hope this doesn’t affect my pirated copies.
I can’t wait for the advertisers to start dictating the content of the programming to help sell ads. Because that’s coming next. Let’s totally wipe the premium sheen off premium streaming TV.
