Apple could afford to be 'the good guy' as long as hardware margins were crushing the competition. But that phase is over. Apple is now also a 'services company', and without the dense MBA-speak of a Stratechery article, that means ads.
Can you imagine the iPod interrupting music playback to show you ads for products on iTunes? Well, that's how Apple Music works now, by nagging you to subscribe to its paid service[0]. A $1000 iPhone/iPad can't play audio files out of the box without showing ads.
Lol, the Youtube app on my Android phone (and Youtube music) do the exact same thing. Every time I open up the app on my phone, I get a gazillion prompts to sign up for a free trial of some new Youtube feature or service (TV, ads-free, listen to music offline etc).
I'm looking into alternative music player apps to replace the Youtube Music app, though I'm not sure how to avoid Youtube itself given that all the interesting content is on there.
I use YouTube Vanced w/ microG on Android. No ads. I also have NewPipe that allows for downloading to MP4 or MP3.
I have a metric ton of criticisms for Apple, and I hope they get slapped with antitrust charges in the future. But the privacy changes we're talking about here are good and should be implemented on other platforms like Android as well. They also represent an important shift in the privacy debate towards consumer control and consumer education that is long overdue and should be praised.
So don't be naive, but also don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Apple is definitely going to abuse their position, but there are other ways to handle that problem than letting Facebook have free reign to track whatever they want.
Let this be a reminder to all of Hacker News that “no corporation is altruistic”. Always assume “evil” by default, until proven otherwise.