This is a polemic, close to flamebait, and I don’t think will lead to much useful discussion here. It has few facts and many ad hominems. There are better articles about this.
That mistake looks like the result of a voice-to-text conversion; I wouldn't be surprised if it was proof read, but by text-to-speech which would hide that mistake in the other direction, too.
... and the alternative is? Apple management answers to shareholders and "service income" is the only thing in Apple earnings that hasn't been going down for years.
Sure, but those are tangentially related to the GP statement about profit growth.
Samsung raw unit sales of smartphones have been decreasing since ... what like 2015 or something? So simply by keeping sales equal, Apple could overtake Samsung in sales. But that wouldn't necessarily indicate an increase in profit.
It's definitely true that services is Apple's biggest income growth right now. And the revenue is already double that of all Macs
The alternative is to take the L and turn it into a win.
Being forced to open up by both the EU and homefront is more than enough a mandate for Tim and the rest of the leadership to make the transition without any trouble from shareholders.
They can use this to really open up the platform and solidify their marketshare.
Now instead you have every major player that doesn't already have its own distribution (Meta, AMZN, NFLX) looking for the exists.
As a side note, this is why I think Zuckerberg burning tens of billions in AR/VR R&D was such a good move. It gave them a foothold in the next thing.
I'll be surprised if the rest of MANGA wont follow suit and double down after what Apple is doing.
It's amazing how "shareholders" is now an effective reason to flout regulation and perform malicious compliance. It's almost too perfect in passing around the blame.
Apple does something shitty, they had to because they owe it to the shareholders. The shareholders are protected by the fiduciary protection allotted to their gamble so the company is in no way responsible for having an ethical or socially beneficial business model.
The EU used to be the "European union of coal and gas industry". I would be VERY careful with accusing them of being pro-consumer or anti-business. Hell, I've worked for them a lot as a consultant, and let me tell you, they actively hate the people around them (normal people livingin Brussels, including their employees). They hate "normal" people. They see themselves as the savior, as the only source of sanity in Europe (and have some good points in that regard, borders, euro, ...)
Which is strange, because there's lots of governments in Brussels, and for example the Belgian Federal government doesn't. Belgian Federal employees totally overwhelm local restaurants, and this is Brussels, right, it's perhaps not London, but whatever weird thing you like eating, brussels has 10 choices in the city center. Lebanese, Chinese, 3 generations Italian, Moroccan, Algerian, and of course Belgian fries, whatever you want, square after square full of restaurants ... But at lunch, impossible to get anything around the north or central station. Or NATO people, while they have a very deserved reputation for paranoia don't hate Brussels. (Consultants are driven around on the NATO compound, phones disabled, for minimum 20 minutes, in a bus with no windows, so you never know what is in which building, and that is if you're coming over to help in one of their data centers. If it's actually classified, like a radar system ... it's not fun) EU commissars, even 2nd and 3rd level are constantly protected by large security forces (~10 people constantly surrounding them, even inside EU commission buildings, they regularly clear the entire area around the Berlaymont building to take those "see, we're approachable" interviews outside they love doing, but really they're about as approachable as a US FT100 CEO), despite that even Jens Stoltenberg mostly only has a driver. The EU is totally isolated from everything. It's a huge government, but located on a relatively small area (the "European quarter"), where you won't find many restaurants, or culture, even the metro station is pretty far away from Berlaymont. EU employees eat inside EU buildings, they live outside of Brussels, they never have meetings outside of EU buildings ...
I've been developing software for 15 years and have never written a single line of code for an Apple device, and never will. While Apple has a monopoly on software for iOS and iPad devices, you do not need to develop for these platforms (and you shouldn't). Any effort you put into their ecosystem only emboldens this awful company.
I would call it malicious compliance at this point. The flippant contempt for anti-trust measures that large companies have openly demonstrated without repercussions for decades is a major reason America may enter into economic decline and doesn’t truly have a free market.
American corporations invented the “trust” concept that anti-trust rules are named after in the mid-1800’s.
The legislation was initially just a list of things that Standard Oil actually did.
America will be just fine. The biggest factor perpetuating the free market and the decline of monopolies is tech progress and the MBA-ification of big companies.
This is true but the thing is, it can take a decade of two for the free market to do its thing.
Its really hard to break network effects, especially at Apples scale.
If it was just gonna end with a minor gatekeeping fee, I can see myself (and other) just biting the bullet but history suggests that this is just the beginning of a massive descent.
Descent of the free market - no, this is how it's supposed to work.
Monopolies can be good for a short while for the economy, although they always go sour after a while.
Standard Oil provided clean(er) and safe(r) lighting and fuel for millions around the world, developing ultra efficient refining and distribution techniques. They even saved the whales by accident.
M$ was much-reviled in the 90's, but their PC monopoly helped establish a standard for computing, which almost certainly contributed positively to the rapid development of hardware and the internet in that time.
The same is true for the iPhone ecosystem and the large-country-sized app economy it spawned.
But if Apple doesn't keep innovating (truly new products, not just newer phones and iOS'es), no amount of monopolistic action will keep them afloat and in fact would probably hasten their decline. These big corpo's become the victims of the economic and technical progress they create.
>The biggest factor perpetuating the free market and the decline of monopolies is tech progress and the MBA-ification of big companies
Could you elaborate on this? It's not seen in practice - both tech progress and MBAs are contributors to the condensing of every industry (airlines, banks, supermarkets, office supply stores, appliance manufacurers, food manufacturers, etc.) into fewer and fewer megacorps with monopoly or oligopoly effects.
MBA-ified companies get worse and worse over time until they fall apart. They become ripe targets for competition and disruption.
Take cable companies; they'll probably always be awful, but that also matters less and less. Or Microsoft; we all hate their awful attitude, but that old desktop paradigm just doesn't rule the world of computing anymore. Same with Google and eventually Apple.
For the other industries you mention there's been less innovation and competition. But if they ever build up a true monopoly in one of those, it will lead to higher margins for the monopoly (otherwise it isn't one!). And the higher margins attract competition.
All the industries you mentioned, especially retail and airlines, are very bare-bones industries that barely make any money. Big operators like Southwest Airlines and Walmart make 1-5% profit in good times. (Banks make more, but there are tons of regulations that prevent competition there, but the upside of those regulations might be a good thing overall).
It'd be lovely to reverse some of the anti-cirumvention laws. Turns out that letting people do things to devices they have purchased is actually great.
Not using a product as the code initially dictates is not actually a criminal violation, in any sane world. The law is making a fool of itself for backing software-as-law as it does.
EU compliance is highlighting all the loopholes for other jurisdictions to close in their respective law. US and Other nations may decide better worded law now. ;)
As with many other tech companies, Apple decide themselves when they think they satisfy the requirements of law.
From now on it will be the courts work to figure out whether that is the case. Right now, we don't know for these changes. But the EU has been seen handing out fines before, because of the tech companies malicious interpretations – so I don't think it will be unreasonable to assume it will happen again.
Apple's official announcement on implementation of the new EU regulations sounded very fear mongering and manipulative, as something an authoritarian cult would write. Reminded me of the writing style of the Watchtower cult magazines.
Developers are already dropping support for macos, at least game devs are after making a big deal of starting to support macs 15 years ago. Too bad considering how powerful the hardware is finally on these macs.
Blizzard hasn't released a new game for macOS since Heroes of the storm back in 2015 and valve has pulled support for Steam VR on mac and won't even bother updating most of their games to intel 64 bit binaries in order to get them working even under rosetta. Also, they won't release CSGO2 for macOS, proton is not supported on macos nor do they have any immediate plans to update steam to a universal binary for AS macs.
Apple dropped support for 32 bit binaries, then migrated from Intel to ARM architecture, breaking backwards compatibility in major way. This led to the inability to run the absolute majority of the existing library of games on the recent Apple hardware and OS.
Unlike the devs in the Apple ecosystem who are used to be on the constant treadmill of app updates to accommodate Apple constantly breaking and changing things with every release, this is incompatible with the gaming industry release model, where after the patch cycle the devs can move onto the next project and rely on the backwards compatibility to trust that their released games will keep running for years and decades into the future.
So when Apple broke this unspoken agreement, the game devs have simply left their existing games in whatever broken state they were, and decided against releasing their future projects on macOS, supporting which wasn't financially viable in the long term, given the time needed and the relatively small percentage of playerbase which uses it.
The powerful view of the hardware is a lot of hype and can only be applied to Macs costing largely over 2k which puts them in a category where they are in fact pretty weak hardware.
And that's if we consider the benchmarks and take all the numbers as truth because in practice real world performance is really not great, even at a very high price.
For example, a 24GB M2 MacBook Pro plays Dota 2 worse than a barely mid-tier AMD APU. Once you realize that, you understand that not only porting will be a lot of work, but porting to the majority of the userbase that is using bottom of the barrel Apple hardware, would be an optimisation nightmare for still a pretty low number of users all things considered.
There is the Apple Silicon hyper and then there is the reality: outside of power consumption optimisation, not really interesting in itself.
I’m mobile iOS developer and have been for several years. The different pain points with iOS development (documentation, Apple) and how Apple is behaving right now, is so disgusting that I want to change focus to anything else than Apple development.
Apple exists to serve customers not developers, theyve made that clear. If you want a force installed unremovable app deployment work with the android folks - plenty of ways to ship stuff there in nasty ways
I transitioned off iOS development this year. I had been doing macOS and iOS development close to 10 years. Apple’s behavior has really put me off their platform as both a developer and user.
And on top of that we are entering this era of developers stopping to give them the time of day at least on the mac platform. Historically developers used to build for mac without seemingly much fuss, that’s just how the industry seemed to work you’d have a native mac and pc app. These days it seems software decisions are made by bean counters more than ever, who look at the numbers at hand with how few today are on the mac platform (or how many people “game” on an ios device perhaps), and don’t bother continuing support. Even popular, seemingly more community supporting developers like Valve are dropping mac support after supporting the platform for over a decade even porting older games over like cs 1.6 in that time. Meanwhile at the apple press conference they are saying how these new macs support ray tracing and are a leap over the m1, seemingly with their heads in the sand at the fact you can probably count on one hand the number of large studios actively developing for their platform today, and that number is liable to shrink with the years if this trend is any indication.
I have had to call apple quite a number of times for product issues. I have almost always left a happier customer.
I know folks who work in CS at Apple. They put up with a lot of nonsense from end users (they have good work stories for sure). They are paid well (living wage), they get stock options, and all of them LOVE their job. Customer support and loving your job is fuckin rare.
I have done CC processing in the past. Candidly the 5-7 percent you pay to do it yourself has the hidden cost of managing charge backs. As a small developer that's NOT something I want to do for a personal/side/small project.
The apple users love it because they KNOW they can call, cancel and get a refund... (and when they dont it's probably because they have been abusing the system, but I digress).
SO here is a company that makes a high quality product, charges obscene margins based on brand, doesn't fuck over it staff (apple employee you pee in a bottle lately, you making good money?), has rabidly loyal customers, and seems intent on not turning them into a product or handing their shit over to the government...
I'm not sure from where I sit, where I have a right to complain about the 30 percent transaction tax.
> I'm not sure from where I sit, where I have a right to complain about the 30 percent transaction tax.
I didn't choose for Apple to win 50% of US mobile and for the other company to also have draconian rules about deploying software and taxing it.
I don't care how much Apple hand holds grandma. Mobile is a hellscape for developers and other companies. The idea that distributing your software should subjugate you to paying taxes to a private company (one that can compete with you) is surreal.
Moreover, mobile is what most consumers use now. You have to be present on mobile to reach them. Web should have been enough, but it isn't. And to make it worse, it's knee-capped to suck on mobile.
It's impossible to enter this market and compete on hardware, so we won't get any reprieve unless regulators put a stop to this.
We need to be able to deploy software at zero cost. Without scare walls or adversarial advertising. Or mandates to use certain software choices. Or mandatory reviews. I'll stop bitching about Apple and Google when that happens.
If Standard Oil could make that same point, it would still be orthogonal to the issue of one company's undue control over commerce in dozens of unrelated fields.
You look at developer behavior on the larger internet and you realize the value Apple provides their customers precisely by “screwing” over developers. Tracking, bait and switch trial offers, impossible cancellations etc etc
It doesn't make any business sense whatsoever to antagonize developers right about when they're about to launch a new product that will need 3rd party support.
Microsoft did the exact same thing and it took them the better part of almost two decades to undo the damage.
The difference here is the entire map has shifted. Tech is no longer just a niche or a B2B thing. Pretty much everyone in the western world is a stakeholder and they chose piss us all off.
This is not gonna end well for Apple. Such a short sighted move by the leadership that has me doubting their leadership.
From the perspective of someone who used to do developer relations for Apple, developers have never had "goodwill" for Apple. "Goodwill" is an emotional plea. Developers do not make platform support decisions based on emotions¹. Developers need to eat.
EU developers will choose to create an App Store competitor or not based on which option they believe will help them make more money. If they believe the new path mandated by the EU will help them make more money, they will take it. If not, they will continue on the current path.
Developers support iOS and App Store because they make money. They will continue to support iOS and App Store as long as they can make money. If that ceases to be true, developers will reevaluate their support Apple's platform(s).
¹ In aggregate, of course. Some developers have enough money and don't answer to anybody, and so have the luxury of making platform support decisions based on emotional factors.
63 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] thread> and developers feeling spurned and insulted enough will be more likely to wan too help replicate
Wan too, wan too, testing.
That mistake looks like the result of a voice-to-text conversion; I wouldn't be surprised if it was proof read, but by text-to-speech which would hide that mistake in the other direction, too.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...
Samsung raw unit sales of smartphones have been decreasing since ... what like 2015 or something? So simply by keeping sales equal, Apple could overtake Samsung in sales. But that wouldn't necessarily indicate an increase in profit.
It's definitely true that services is Apple's biggest income growth right now. And the revenue is already double that of all Macs
Being forced to open up by both the EU and homefront is more than enough a mandate for Tim and the rest of the leadership to make the transition without any trouble from shareholders.
They can use this to really open up the platform and solidify their marketshare.
Now instead you have every major player that doesn't already have its own distribution (Meta, AMZN, NFLX) looking for the exists.
As a side note, this is why I think Zuckerberg burning tens of billions in AR/VR R&D was such a good move. It gave them a foothold in the next thing.
I'll be surprised if the rest of MANGA wont follow suit and double down after what Apple is doing.
Apple does something shitty, they had to because they owe it to the shareholders. The shareholders are protected by the fiduciary protection allotted to their gamble so the company is in no way responsible for having an ethical or socially beneficial business model.
Corporate interests have us all by the balls.
Which is strange, because there's lots of governments in Brussels, and for example the Belgian Federal government doesn't. Belgian Federal employees totally overwhelm local restaurants, and this is Brussels, right, it's perhaps not London, but whatever weird thing you like eating, brussels has 10 choices in the city center. Lebanese, Chinese, 3 generations Italian, Moroccan, Algerian, and of course Belgian fries, whatever you want, square after square full of restaurants ... But at lunch, impossible to get anything around the north or central station. Or NATO people, while they have a very deserved reputation for paranoia don't hate Brussels. (Consultants are driven around on the NATO compound, phones disabled, for minimum 20 minutes, in a bus with no windows, so you never know what is in which building, and that is if you're coming over to help in one of their data centers. If it's actually classified, like a radar system ... it's not fun) EU commissars, even 2nd and 3rd level are constantly protected by large security forces (~10 people constantly surrounding them, even inside EU commission buildings, they regularly clear the entire area around the Berlaymont building to take those "see, we're approachable" interviews outside they love doing, but really they're about as approachable as a US FT100 CEO), despite that even Jens Stoltenberg mostly only has a driver. The EU is totally isolated from everything. It's a huge government, but located on a relatively small area (the "European quarter"), where you won't find many restaurants, or culture, even the metro station is pretty far away from Berlaymont. EU employees eat inside EU buildings, they live outside of Brussels, they never have meetings outside of EU buildings ...
The legislation was initially just a list of things that Standard Oil actually did.
America will be just fine. The biggest factor perpetuating the free market and the decline of monopolies is tech progress and the MBA-ification of big companies.
Its really hard to break network effects, especially at Apples scale.
If it was just gonna end with a minor gatekeeping fee, I can see myself (and other) just biting the bullet but history suggests that this is just the beginning of a massive descent.
Descent of the free market - no, this is how it's supposed to work.
Monopolies can be good for a short while for the economy, although they always go sour after a while.
Standard Oil provided clean(er) and safe(r) lighting and fuel for millions around the world, developing ultra efficient refining and distribution techniques. They even saved the whales by accident.
M$ was much-reviled in the 90's, but their PC monopoly helped establish a standard for computing, which almost certainly contributed positively to the rapid development of hardware and the internet in that time.
The same is true for the iPhone ecosystem and the large-country-sized app economy it spawned.
But if Apple doesn't keep innovating (truly new products, not just newer phones and iOS'es), no amount of monopolistic action will keep them afloat and in fact would probably hasten their decline. These big corpo's become the victims of the economic and technical progress they create.
Could you elaborate on this? It's not seen in practice - both tech progress and MBAs are contributors to the condensing of every industry (airlines, banks, supermarkets, office supply stores, appliance manufacurers, food manufacturers, etc.) into fewer and fewer megacorps with monopoly or oligopoly effects.
Take cable companies; they'll probably always be awful, but that also matters less and less. Or Microsoft; we all hate their awful attitude, but that old desktop paradigm just doesn't rule the world of computing anymore. Same with Google and eventually Apple.
For the other industries you mention there's been less innovation and competition. But if they ever build up a true monopoly in one of those, it will lead to higher margins for the monopoly (otherwise it isn't one!). And the higher margins attract competition.
All the industries you mentioned, especially retail and airlines, are very bare-bones industries that barely make any money. Big operators like Southwest Airlines and Walmart make 1-5% profit in good times. (Banks make more, but there are tons of regulations that prevent competition there, but the upside of those regulations might be a good thing overall).
Their attitude of non-compliance with pro-consumer regulations starts to be seen as selfish.
Right now Apple has a positive brand image.
These actions have the ability to tarnish their reputation .. especially if long time developers break out of their enchantment with the ecosystem.
Not using a product as the code initially dictates is not actually a criminal violation, in any sane world. The law is making a fool of itself for backing software-as-law as it does.
From now on it will be the courts work to figure out whether that is the case. Right now, we don't know for these changes. But the EU has been seen handing out fines before, because of the tech companies malicious interpretations – so I don't think it will be unreasonable to assume it will happen again.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/01/apple-announces-chang...
[edit] although for context this team rolls their own engine. If you’re using Unity or Unreal > 5.2 (May 2023) things are slowly improving.
Unlike the devs in the Apple ecosystem who are used to be on the constant treadmill of app updates to accommodate Apple constantly breaking and changing things with every release, this is incompatible with the gaming industry release model, where after the patch cycle the devs can move onto the next project and rely on the backwards compatibility to trust that their released games will keep running for years and decades into the future.
So when Apple broke this unspoken agreement, the game devs have simply left their existing games in whatever broken state they were, and decided against releasing their future projects on macOS, supporting which wasn't financially viable in the long term, given the time needed and the relatively small percentage of playerbase which uses it.
And Intel apps work fine on ARM.
"they are dumb and slow"
And that's if we consider the benchmarks and take all the numbers as truth because in practice real world performance is really not great, even at a very high price.
For example, a 24GB M2 MacBook Pro plays Dota 2 worse than a barely mid-tier AMD APU. Once you realize that, you understand that not only porting will be a lot of work, but porting to the majority of the userbase that is using bottom of the barrel Apple hardware, would be an optimisation nightmare for still a pretty low number of users all things considered.
There is the Apple Silicon hyper and then there is the reality: outside of power consumption optimisation, not really interesting in itself.
It has now fully becomes an Operation, Sales and Marketing company.
Thicker devices with better batteries, MacBooks with many ports, iPads with pencils.
I have had to call apple quite a number of times for product issues. I have almost always left a happier customer.
I know folks who work in CS at Apple. They put up with a lot of nonsense from end users (they have good work stories for sure). They are paid well (living wage), they get stock options, and all of them LOVE their job. Customer support and loving your job is fuckin rare.
I have done CC processing in the past. Candidly the 5-7 percent you pay to do it yourself has the hidden cost of managing charge backs. As a small developer that's NOT something I want to do for a personal/side/small project.
The apple users love it because they KNOW they can call, cancel and get a refund... (and when they dont it's probably because they have been abusing the system, but I digress).
SO here is a company that makes a high quality product, charges obscene margins based on brand, doesn't fuck over it staff (apple employee you pee in a bottle lately, you making good money?), has rabidly loyal customers, and seems intent on not turning them into a product or handing their shit over to the government...
I'm not sure from where I sit, where I have a right to complain about the 30 percent transaction tax.
I didn't choose for Apple to win 50% of US mobile and for the other company to also have draconian rules about deploying software and taxing it.
I don't care how much Apple hand holds grandma. Mobile is a hellscape for developers and other companies. The idea that distributing your software should subjugate you to paying taxes to a private company (one that can compete with you) is surreal.
Moreover, mobile is what most consumers use now. You have to be present on mobile to reach them. Web should have been enough, but it isn't. And to make it worse, it's knee-capped to suck on mobile.
It's impossible to enter this market and compete on hardware, so we won't get any reprieve unless regulators put a stop to this.
We need to be able to deploy software at zero cost. Without scare walls or adversarial advertising. Or mandates to use certain software choices. Or mandatory reviews. I'll stop bitching about Apple and Google when that happens.
As a developer and founder, grandma before developers. Every time. iOS is the first platform my family can just run with safely.
The difference here is the entire map has shifted. Tech is no longer just a niche or a B2B thing. Pretty much everyone in the western world is a stakeholder and they chose piss us all off.
This is not gonna end well for Apple. Such a short sighted move by the leadership that has me doubting their leadership.
EU developers will choose to create an App Store competitor or not based on which option they believe will help them make more money. If they believe the new path mandated by the EU will help them make more money, they will take it. If not, they will continue on the current path.
Developers support iOS and App Store because they make money. They will continue to support iOS and App Store as long as they can make money. If that ceases to be true, developers will reevaluate their support Apple's platform(s).
¹ In aggregate, of course. Some developers have enough money and don't answer to anybody, and so have the luxury of making platform support decisions based on emotional factors.