People are annoyed at apple’s recent lack of polish in software, but the increasing monetization and push into services are a bigger issue imo. You pay the apple premium for hardware and the hardware is indeed great, but you’re increasingly treated like a piggy bank. Line must go up.

In regard to Maps: if all you want is a gps, there’s many apps that use OpenStreetMap data. I use CoMaps myself. You download the map(s) you want and it just works, no forced updates or ads or anything in the way of upselling.

Strangely enough I often use Google Maps on my iPhone because I'm looking for businesses that have no presence on Apple Maps. I don't see the opportunity for companies to present themselves in Apple's app as a net negative for users.

Line must go up.

The margins in the services category are much higher (76.7%) than hardware (38.7%) [1] and much easier to grow in an already saturated smartphone market. So yeah, time to throw the customers under the bus.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/apple-earn...

when I switched from Windows to Apple the amount of ads was the same. The only thing that changed was that they were Apple's ads. Apple hardware is great, but it's being severely botched by it's software. Seems like software is hard, no matter how much money you have.