A letter to Tim Cook

Dear Mr. Tim Cook,

Sally forth and receive carnal knowledge unto thyself.

Respectfully,
Your Lost Customer

With that out of the way let me tell you that iPhone 16 Pro Max is the last Apple product I bought. Maybe you don't care, but in the very unlikely case that you do, here's why:

Enshitification of user experience

When you buy a new phone, you are exposed to Incessant bombardment with "free" offers via email (despite saying you don't want marketing emails) and on the device itself over the period of three months after the purchase.

• The popup nag for "free" Apple Music in Music app is a dark pattern in UI design -- it has an close button which is all but impossible to click to dismiss it and instead it leads into onboarding process the first time you try to click it.
• Files app has Recent section which can't be disabled or cleared and if you connect to a network share it will list files you never interacted with, much less opened.
• Settings now has a nag entry called Services Included With Your Purchase -- I never asked for this and I don't want to see it. Only option I have to dismiss five individual entries is clicking Not Now on each of them five times, there's no way to dismiss all of them at once. What happened to user choice? Where's Never Ask Me Again option? What happened to computing devices making our life easier instead of making us develop RSI by repeatedly dismissing your "free" offers?
• App Store search is useless and sometimes downright malicious. Instead of returning exact match to the query which exists it pushes the result down with sponsored content until it is off the screen, not to mention that I've seen ads for crypto currency apps instead of actual results. Really eco-friendly stuff from a zero emissions company like Apple.
• Not even privacy which was the main selling point of Apple ecosystem is sancrosanct anymore -- for example, Enhanced Visual Search was enabled with iOS update without consent and onboarding. Even though it's designed with privacy in mind, the fact that Apple has full control over the phone OS means that behavior of this feature can change and if it is extended to detect "problematic" content it would be trivial to request the device to deanonimize the user.

Lack of substantial product improvements

• Hardware upgrades are so minimal at this point that getting a new phone doesn't make any sense and feels like a ripoff.
• Camera sensors are stuck in 2015 with crappy Sony sensors still exhibiting the same fuzzy watercolor noise in images which not even the most advanced DSP and ML processing can fully eliminate. It might look good for regular people, but the quality is just crap as the photos lack resolution and fine detail -- they still haven't caught up with even 21MPix Canon 5D Mark II from that era.

Balkanization of services

Unless you are in the USA, in order to have all the apps, books, music, etc you need to use 3 different regional iTunes stores. As a counter-example, Steam allows me to buy everything in my region and handles VAT calculations and submissions correctly for all purchases. If they can do it why can't a 3T$ valuated company priding itself in "courage" and "innovation" do the same and drop those regional blocks between the stores.

Conclusion

Your dear friend Steve must be spinning in his grave right now -- maybe you could ask his family for permission to use him as a power source for the AI datacenter which handles all the nonsensical and useless features you've added to iOS because of FOMO on the AI hype train.

I used to like and enjoy using Apple products, but this upselling, nay, bullying, is a bridge too far for me -- you can't pitch privacy to me and then intrude on it yourself. So once again, go fuck yourself along with everyone else in your team who's enabling this.