Forced iAds Coming To OS X?

mario_grgic writes "Apple insider brings a story about expansion and renewal of a current 'Advertisement in Operating System' patent that Apple's Steve Jobs and other contributors have. The patent describes in detail (with OS X screen shots) how the forced ads would work (they would disable some OS functionality until the ad is viewed), but apparently it also applies to any device with a UI, including phones, TVs, set top boxes, etc. With Apple's recent entry into the mobile ad business, and its ambition to own half of all the mobile ads served during the second half of this year, it certainly makes one wonder if Apple would dare and put something like this in its desktop OS. I wonder if this would push more people to open source alternatives?"

Comments

Re:Interesting Spin in the Summary

[VGPowerlord]

1, 2, 3. According to the Q2 2010 statistics, Apple is 4th place in the US with 9.8% of the market. Ahead of them are (3rd) Acer with 11.3%, (2nd) Dell with 23.7%, and (1st) HP with 25.7%.

Apple doesn't even make the top 6 world-wide; number 6 has 5.1%, so it's less than that.

6.

"The consumer PC market registered double-digit shipment growth, but consumer mobile shipment growth slowed. This was due in part to slower growth of mini-notebooks," Ms. Kitagawa said. "Surging popularity of Apple's iPad temporarily cannibalized mini-notebooks, as well as consumer notebook sales to some degree. It is not certain at this stage if the cannibalization will continue with the current price point of media tablets."

-- Gartner, talking about the US computer market

What does this mean? It means that (in the US market), the iPad has stolen some of the mini-notebook (AKA Netbook) growth, but it is still a growing market segment.

Source: Gartner Says Worldwide PC Shipments Increased 21 Percent in Second Quarter of 2010

Re:Interesting Spin in the Summary

[Nixoloco]

There are a large number of things that I hate Apple products for, the desktop environment that does not lend itself to heavy multitasking (from a user perspective), ... the poorly organized layout which makes Spotlight the main way to access your files and programs. iAds will go a long way to adding to the annoyance that is the Apple experience.

Bring on the enforced ad watching.

What are you talking about? OSX lends itself wonderfully to multitasking from all perspectives. Expose + Spaces are phenomenal for running multiple applications even supporting multiple desktops to break up tasks which is all well supported by the underlying Unix based OS. Also, what is so hard about accessing files and programs? You have a home directory for your data and an applications directory for programs? If you want something even better, install Quicksilver or Launchbar.