News+ missed opportunity

I definitely agree that there are some missed issues around Apple News , especially where it comes to creating open and accessible journalism. I DO think their approach to magazines is super helpful. I talk about that a bit more in the most recent 30 and Counting, but I think the subscription model that provides a bunch of magazines and where the articles within the magazines are broken out so that you can find them by topic and not just by issues is a major breakthrough for magazine access. So I think it depends if you view Apple News

@EddieHinkle I’m very eager to see how all of this plays out. I enjoy Apple News but turn off all recommendations. I find services frustrating when they try to integrate recommended content into the main feed; I didn’t follow it, so don’t show it to me. It’s never bang-on and can end up wasting time in scrolling. I also like the idea of magazines in the app, as that is an avenue for beautiful content and the chance to discover new stories in a particular publication of choice.

When they can't even launch with a basic professional level of software quality I find it difficult to expect Apple to care about big ideas like the web and accessible technology.

It's just another "4%" offering, centring a US-Only feature in their launch events, again.

Apple keep doing this, making it clear that they regard the rest of us as adjuncts to their shiny US-Centred worldview.

@dgold many of these services they announce are US only which makes them less interesting for people like me (I still haven’t access to Apple News - without the plus - and when I search for it I get the suggestion to use Flipboard). This makes Apple stuff expensive stuff which can’t use some of the interesting stuff because I’m not in the US

@dgold Except they do like keeping their cash somewhere else.

I tried it out last night and this morning. I think discussing News+ has to be split into newspaper vs magazines.

WSJ is in the subscription but they only send a portion of their content to News+ so it is not an alternative to my real WSJ subscription. The WSJ in News+ is really not much different than NYT sending it’s content to the News app except the WSJ will get some $. The LA Times seems to be the only other noteworthy newspaper participant so things are very sparse on the newspaper side at the moment. Total meh for me. Hopefully this will change.

The magazine side looks quite appealing if they will clean up the UI. I certainly think there is a lot of great content for a very reasonable price and ANF is a definite plus. My biggest complaint is when I open the News app I’m faced with a very busy screen. A scrolling side bar that I just don’t want to see, a tiny row of magazines I said I was interested in dwarfed by giant photos from magazines I’m not interested in. The UX feels designed to distract from purposeful use and instead cause people to wander off track a la mindless web browsing.

I don’t think the comparisons against RSS readers make much sense. I doubt if RSS users are the primary audience nor am I aware of an RSS reader that handles high end magazines. Using the app do I think changing the font is at the top of the list of improvements? Heck no. I’m not saying News+ is a great thing. I don’t know if I’ll keep it and I would like to see the newspaper part turn into something worthwhile. But I think it isn’t a failure on day 0.

Agree with your points. The reason they ended up this way is because Tim Apple went into a room of product people and said "increase service revenue". They built a product around that and not user/publisher problems.

I think you like me are to some degree pining for an Apple that no longer exists. The motivation it appears is money followed by humanity these days unfortunately

@adamprocter Yeah, I do miss some aspects of the 1990s Apple as the underdog. On the other hand, as a developer it's nice never having to worry that the company is in (financial) trouble.

true dat but your platform is I would say the web now really. It just so happens the 1st party best clients are yours on macOS and iOS as Apple still has the best OS ecosystem. Though once CORS is on I heard there is some nifty web ones round the corner 😜😉

That reminds me: I wonder if I am the only person who remembers how utterly horrible the PowerBooks were back then (e.g. the 5300).

@ronguest It's funny how we talk about how "terrible" some of today's Apple products are, but we conveniently forget all the misses from the old Apple. 🙂

@ronguest I totally agree with you on this one. Cracks in PowerMac Cubes, unreliable early Newtons, white MacBooks with peeling laminate... and of course, I do love my iPod Hi-Fi, although it was an expensive market failure. For all of these supposedly ordinary things that they release now, they are somehow more successful than ever! :)

@ronguest @martinfeld My junior-year roommate had a 5300; once Apple fixed it, it was a good machine for him, but I recall him saying it had been frustrating getting to that state (I forget what was bad about the 5300; I just remember them being a giant lemon).

And then the next year, my brand-new Wallstreet had to go back for the display cable fix after only a month. (Hinges and display cables…they were the keyboards and power cords of that era :-P )

@smokey So what we’ve learnt is that nothing has really changed! People just forget the bad things from the past whilst being frustrated about the present.

@martinfeld Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose ;-)

@smokey I had to translate that. Indeed! Are you a French speaker?

@martinfeld Oh, sorry; it’s a reasonably-common French phrase here in the ‘States, or at least within certain disciplines, so I wrongly assumed it was across the Anglophone world, too :-(

(I am enough of a French speaker to be dangerous, but not enough of one to be truly useful ;-) )

@smokey That’s OK, no reason to apologise! Once I translated it, I understood completely and it seemed familiar.