This is just so weird to watch. Apple is literally throwing a tantrum on a continent-wide stage. Like, it's one attempt at escalation after another, and they keep losing (either their legal fights, or their nerve) and having to reverse course.
Like, there's no strategy at all here? Just keep swinging and hope you land a blow that breaks through the armor? This is how my 15 year old plays VR games.
That's the confusing part. With the DMA policy at least there's a strategy, even if it's a strategy that will ultimately be rejected as non-compliant.
Picking these petty fights or whining about getting fined is not helpful, certainly not to Apple and their shareholders. It's hard not to conclude that Apple leadership is making stupid emotional decisions rather than rational ones, which is especially dumb when you're running a trillion dollar company.
My impression is they got used to just bullying everyone into submission by virtue of their market power and they found an opponent where that won't work. Now everyone can see that the emperor has no clothes.
I don't think there is a strategy, this is all theater so he has some pushback if investors file complaints or lawsuits during the next quarterly results meeting. They can't say that Tim Cook didn't do everything in his power to make them even *more* money.
Since, ultimately, his duty as a CEO is to prioritize the financial wealth of shareholders. If he just complied with the EU then he'd be voted out by the board by the end of the week.
Is he going overboard? I think so. But I've also never owned a $2T+ company with investors and an entire government breathing down my neck.
> If he just complied with the EU then he'd be voted out by the board by the end of the week.
Most companies like Facebook and Microsoft quietly comply with the rules as best they can with as little fanfare as possible. Maybe after paying a fine or two. As far as I know, there hasn't been any oustings because of that.
Apple hasn't faced a fine yet for this, so there's really no material harm to them for acting like this. And it's great theater for shareholders. I'm sure once we get to the point where the EU is going to begin issuing fines for DMA violations then Apple will change their position.
Microsoft was acting like this in the 90s. I think history is just repeating itself with Apple.
> Microsoft was acting like this in the 90s. I think history is just repeating itself with Apple.
So... the difference was Microsoft was winning those fights because their enemy was other products in the market. They'd tell Dell not to ship Netscape, and Dell would yank the product. They'd clone java, and websites would code to that to get IE compliance. They'd push ActiveX and bribe web properties to implement it, and they would. This wasn't fair, but it was at least in some sense "competition". (I mean, eventually MS would go on to lose control of all those levers, but over decades of timescale and generally due to market motion.)
Apple here is just flailing. It's a regulatory action, not a competitor. There's no feasible path to beating or evading EU law. Surely they know that, right?
Apple stands to lose a lot more due to the DMA and parties like Spotify and Epic are doing everything they can to make Apple look bad in the public eye.
Microsoft and Google seem to be able to comply without publicly embarrassing themselves. Investors are not stupid, they understand that companies have to comply with the law. This behavior is totally on management. If I were a big investor I’d be more worried by this since it seems like management are acting irrationally without any plan.
Microsoft's compliance is largely to allow for Bing to be removed as their built-in search, and ability to uninstall Edge. They are also only allowing this within the EU market, not globally.
Google just needs to allow for the selection of a default browser, provide links in Google search to competing sites (which Google will still make money off of with their ad delivery network anyway), opt-out option for sharing data between YT, Search, Maps, etc. As well as allow outside payment processors for apps.
For Microsoft and Google, none of these changes are affecting their cash cow. Cloud computing for MS, and ads for Google.
These DMA changes are affecting Apple's cash cow, the iPhone. and their second largest cash cow, Services and IAP. Apple has a LOT more on the line with these DMA changes than MS or Google do.
> Since, ultimately, his duty as a CEO is to prioritize the financial wealth of shareholders.
I feel like the whole fiduciary responsibility bit is always the foundation of terrible arguments. As if every individual choice that earns a dollar is therefore forced.
Earning multiple billion dollar fines is not serving shareholders. Sabotaging the future is not serving shareholders. Destroying goodwill is not serving shareholders.
Apple's various tantrums and desperate clutching onto their market hasn't remotely been beneficial for the company, and I'd argue it is a big reason the company has started plateauing. Like how Valve went from being a game maker to being a purveyor of gambling crates and keys, Apple is desperately pimping for every bit of rent-seeking and service fees.
I also hate fiduciary responsibility as a foundation for arguments, but it is a responsibility that will be 100% utilized by any of the shareholders who feel strongly enough that Cook didn't do everything in his power to generate more money. So it's still something that has to be taken into consideration.
> Earning multiple billion-dollar fines is not serving shareholders.
Correct, and until Apple is threatened with fines, I believe they'll continue doing this until it no longer serves them.
I don't find the tantrums to be the cause of the plateauing, I think they're a response to it. The iPhone is their #1 money-maker (by a massive margin at that), and the smartphone market as a whole has been plateauing. That's why we've seen a shift over the years towards services, which is their #2 money-maker now. When the DMA strongly affects both of these revenue streams, tantrums will ensue.
I'm not agreeing that what they're doing is correct, and I think it's shitty for a company that I consider the reason I got into the dev/design space to begin with to start acting like this. But I do see some business logic behind why they're doing what they're doing, even when it goes against what I know is correct.
I think the board and shareholders probably want them to avoid picking needless fights with the world's most powerful competition regulator in the week when its most powerful regulations went into effect.
Trying again and again until you get what you want seems to be how it works. Seems to be the same for when adversarial change causes enough public backlash. Oh no we were called out for <bad thing>, let’s wait a few months and try again, until it gets through unnoticed enough to show up on the radar.
> The termination of Epic Games Sweden AB’s Apple developer account was communicated in a letter from Mark Perry, a lawyer representing Apple, to Epic’s lawyers:
> Mr. Sweeney’s response to that request was wholly insufficient and not credible. It boiled down to an unsupported “trust us.” History shows, however, that Epic is verifiably untrustworthy, hence the request for meaningful commitments. And the minimal assurances in Mr. Sweeney’s curt response were swiftly undercut by a litany of public attacks on Apple’s policies, compliance plan, and business model. As just one example: https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1762243725533532587?s=20.
Maybe Tim sent more than a two sentence reply to Phil to get it straightened out. It's anyone's guess at this point.
More likely that the request for more information on this case from the EU commission to Apple triggered the walk back. At least the EU Commissioner for the internal market is happy about the reverse: https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464
Yikes I hate that Thierry is using "#freefortnite". You can be completely on board with the DMA but still see Epic's behavior as entirely profit motivated and "freeing Fortnite" should not be any official's priority. Epic is not some oppressed minority that needs saving.
> You can be completely on board with the DMA but still see Epic's behavior as entirely profit motivated and "freeing Fortnite" should not be any official's priority.
The Digital Markets Act is all about profit-motivated businesses. It regulates markets, not charities. It's not anti-profit at all, just pro-competition, and Apple was attempting to stifle competition.
VisionOS is not consider a gatekeeper my the DMA, and despite the platform supporting it Valve has made no effort to expand their game store to Android. It is doubtful that they will work on an iOS game distribution platform.
"better"? You're giving Epic too much credit. Just see the Play Store competitors like Samsung or Huawei: Full of ads, and in general a terrible experience.
It's literally a Digital MARKETS Act. Markets are all about developing healthy profitable businesses. They certainly are not going to be bothered that Epic, a profitable business, wants a fair playing field to compete on.
Isn't that the functional purpose of hashtags? So that people interested in a topic can find information about it? Wouldn't this tweet be highly relevant to people searching with that tag?
It's not about Epic. It's about Apple wantonly violating EU laws. The target simply happened to be Epic.
That being said: it's probably a good thing it was Epic that Apple went after; Apple would probably have gotten away with going after a smaller company.
Every large company is, by nature, amoral. All the pro-social stances or whatever are generally just window dressing and PR. Individuals can be moral, but for-profit corporations past a certain size just are too abstract of an entity with too many people of competing interests to ascribe morality to. We shouldn't care about intentions, just whether they're doing something we agree with or not.
While the outcome as it stands might be okay, they should still proceed with the request for more information so that they can better guard against removal of access in cases that they do not agree with.
What's to prevent them from changing their mind and blocking Epic again? What if Tim Sweeney says something else to hurt Apple's feelings in the future? Apple has too much free rein over removing access to this market, and while it may be a market that Apple has made, the EU is clearly requiring Apple to open up the market for others with the only restrictions being those where the app store or the apps themselves are damaging to consumers in the marketplace.
> they should still proceed with the request for more information so that they can better guard against removal of access in cases that they do not agree with.
They almost certainly are, which is why the reasoning of EU’s predictable involvement was what triggered Apple’s reinstatement of Epic’s account seems dubious to me.
I don't really understand the notion that Sweeney's original response was terse or insufficient. He said exactly what needed to be said (good faith effort to follow the rules) succinctly and professionally. Should he have offered a pinky swear or a blood oath? Or an essay pledging his allegiance? I generally like Apple and their products but in this instance they came across as bitter and petty.
What then would be sufficient? Or are you saying it's simply OK for Apple to ban a major company from their app store? Before you say that, keep in mind that Apple has over 50% of smartphone market share -- they aren't "just another company", should they really be able to decide for that many people that they're not allowed to use Epic's product?
Also I should point out that there's a significant difference between breaking a contract mutually agreed upon and negotiated by two companies, versus breaking a ToS that's forced upon you. Epic's "rule breaking" was essentially a legal strategy to force Apple to legally justify their control. It wasn't some random hooliganism.
Business is an at-will arrangement, at least in the free parts of the world. If Apple straight up doesn't want to do business with Epic and can even point to prior breaches and violations of terms as justification, more power to them.
Remember the classic and often seen disclaimer: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
> Business is an at-will arrangement, at least in the free parts of the world
Funny, because part of what makes the free parts of the world "free" is competition, which is exactly what Apple is trying to stifle.
Also it's funny you cite that disclaimer about right of refusal, because in fact, there are plenty of discrimination laws that address just that and in general there are reasons you can and can't refuse service, legally speaking.
> Epic wasn't forced to sign anything.
Sure, plenty of businesses just love to ignore >50% of the market. I'm sure their investors would completely understand.
> 1. Epic isn't a part of a protected class. Please stop adding to the noise of diluting the meaning of the word "discrimination".
You're the one that cited right of refusal *shrug*
> 2. Epic violated mutually agreed upon terms in cases prior, which Apple can rightfully cite in future references.
"Mutually agreed upon" is a hilarious way of putting it. Epic rebelled against a bad system. More importantly, they won. The law is more important now than Apple's rules, and the fact that Apple backed down shows that they know that.
> 3. Apple customers are free to choose Android or Windows or any other platform with Epic software. Competition, baby!
As an Apple customer, this pisses me off. I have no desire to switch but I also have no desire for Apple to act in this way. Epic's win is good for customers, only Apple fanboys or investors are upset by this.
> 4. If you want to do business with someone, you and them both agree to and abide by terms set forth. If you don't like the terms, you renegotiate and if that doesn't pan out you terminate the agreement according to terms therein or otherwise as amicably as possible and go on your way.
They did renegotiate... through the courts. There are reasons we have antitrust laws and anti-monopoly laws. You cant have any sort of reasonable negotiation when one side is a 900 pound gorilla. Regulation matters when it comes to market access
> 5. Bluntly speaking, Epic might need Apple but Apple doesn't need Epic.
So your point is that Apple is a mega-giant that doesn't feel harm from banning a smaller competitor? You're basically making my point for me.
> If you want to do business with someone, you and them both agree to and abide by terms set forth. If you don't like the terms, you renegotiate and if that doesn't pan out you terminate the agreement according to terms therein or otherwise as amicably as possible and go on your way.
Well no. Instead of that, if the other party is required by law to do business with you, then you can use government force to make them do so.
And if Apple disagrees, then they are perfectly within their right to shutdown their EU operations and lose tens of billions of dollars I guess.
But the rest of us are perfectly willing to use democratically enacted laws, as they are intended.
> but Apple doesn't need Epic
They need the EU though. And if they don't comply with the law then they will be fined many billions of dollars, or be shut down entirely in the EU.
> If Apple straight up doesn't want to do business with Epic and can even point to prior breaches and violations of terms as justification, more power to them.
This would be true, if Apple hadn't positioned themselves as gatekeeper to running software on a significant portion of the world's personal computers. If Apple wants full say over who they do business with all it has to do is allow its users to install software distributed by parties they do not do business with.
I agree, but this is missing the point. It was never about Sweeney’s response. Apple was never going to accept any response given, in the same way that an Alabama cop who pulls over a driver for being black is not going to leave without finding some “reason” for an arrest.
Tim Cook managed to be cool calm and diplomatic when dealing with Trump and his trade war with China. Why is Tim Cook suddenly acting irrational and child-like when dealing with EU? This behaviour we're seeing from Apple recently is happening in front on investors and everyone else's eyes because Tim Cook is personally green-lighting this behaviour. What's going on inside Apple? Is it because none of their hardware is growing anymore and they don't have an AI strategy to offset their stock which is currently in free fall and is about to be bypassesed by nVidia?
Aside from their spectacular laptops with arm, they seem like they are being left behind.
Vision Pro is probably a gimmick along with the whole VR world right now, which will change soon too but overall I don't see anything exciting about apple.
Their pricing is infuriating and so are their decisions (laptop 8gb ram in 2024???)
To me it looks like they got stuck in the "this is what worked for us, so let's only do this" mentality and take no risks.
They stand on the shoulders of giants and most importantly on their cultural presence...
I’m a mac user at home, and I don’t get their AI story/path now that they’re not supporting AMD/Nvidia GPUs since the Apple Silicon transition.
Maybe they’ll manage to get LLMs running well locally with the new low-bit developments? Not my area. But for training/learning it seems like Apple is DOA. They have the same problem as AMD, no one is doing research with their hardware or software.
Intentionally shipping low RAM/unified memory quantities seems short sighted too. Maybe with a 16GB baseline they could do something special with local LLMs.
I think you are looking at a very narrow use case and deciding that because they do not make a system you'd be happy with for your niche use that they are DOA. Someone selling just under 6.5 million units of anything seems like the opposite of dead to me. Are there vendors selling more? Of course, but there are also vendors selling less. Not every Mac user cares about AI and training or fine tuning a local LLM.
Very true, my needs are niche for sure. But I’m more thinking about the near future. AI/LLMs are going to have some general applications that users are going to want, and will become the norm, and I think it’s clear that will shake out soon. Apple is at risk of being left behind because the only people working on that stuff for Apple, work at Apple. Hobbyists and researchers are on Linux/Windows for the most part. Software development doesn’t have such a large platform difference, lots of developers use macOS. But ML is different and I think they should care.
> But ML is different and I think they should care.
It’s totally this time I promise, just like, one more ~~lane~~ model.
I’m sure they do care. I wouldn’t be surprised if they land significant support for on-app processing of models, they’ve already got the chip, dropping in local models is a sensible next step, and if close to zero effort for them.
> LLMs are going to have some general applications that users are going to want, and will become the norm
I have yet to see anyone, in my personal or professional circles, use any LLM:
- for more than a week
- for anything more than cutesy trivial things.
I’m sure there’s people around stapling models into their toaster, but this is so far from the normal.
Part of Apple's problem is that they're expected to vendor support for third-party stuff. Who accelerates Pytorch or ONNX for Apple silicon, if not Apple?
They've done an okay job of that so far, but their flagship library is diverging pretty far from industry demand. At best, CoreML is a slightly funkier Tensorflow - at worst, it's a single-platform model cemetery. No matter what road they take, they have to keep investing in upstream support if they want Nvidia to feel the heat. Otherwise, it's CUDA vs CoreML which is an unwinnable fight when you're selling to datacenter customers.
I think it's possible for Apple to make everyone happy here by reducing hostilities and dedicating good work where it matters. Generally though, it feels like they're wasting resources trying to compete with Nvidia and retread the Open Source work of 3 different companies.
> an unwinnable fight when you're selling to datacenter customers.
didn't Apple pretty much throw in the towel in this market simply by choice of form factor for their computers? The sheer desperation of their users wanting a device in this space is shown in the "creative" ways to mount their offerings in a rack.
all of the user friendly things they've done by shrinking the footprint, making them silent, etc are all things a data center does not care about. make it loud with fans to keep things cool so they can run at full load 24/7 without fear of melting down.
so from that lead alone, we can make the next assumption in that Apple doesn't care about vs CUDA. as long as they can show a chart in an over produced hype video for a new hardware announcement that has "arrows go up" as a theme, that is ALL they care about.
I mostly agree, which is why I question their strategy of even "competing" at all. The existence of CoreML feels strictly obligatory, as if the existence of Pytorch and Tensorflow spurned FOMO from the C-suites. It's not terrible, but it's also pretty pointless when the competing libraries do more things, faster.
Users, developers, and probably Apple too would benefit from just using the prior art. I'd go as far as to argue Apple can't thread the AI needle without embracing community contributions. The field simply moves too fast to ship "AI Siri" and call it a day.
> The sheer desperation of their users wanting a device in this space is shown in the "creative" ways to mount their offerings in a rack.
Well you and I both know that nobody is doing that to beat AWS on hosting costs. It's a novelty, and the utility beyond that is restricted to the few processes that require MacOS in some arbitrary way. If we're being honest with ourselves, any muppet with a power drill and enough 1U rails can rackmount a Mac Mini.
>I mostly agree, which is why I question their strategy of even "competing" at all.
If it makes their camera "smarter", it's a win. If they can make Siri do something more than "start a timer", then it's a win. If they can have images translate text more accurately, it's a win. There's a lot of things that an on device AI could help users without having to do all of the power hungry creation of a model or the fine tuning. They can do that in the mothership, and just push models on their device.
Not everyone needs to do AI the way you are trying to do it
I think that's a mistaken way of viewing it. Apple's failure in the gaming space is entirely a matter of policy; you look over at the Steam Deck and Valve is running Microsoft IP without paying for their runtime. Some people really do get their cake and eat it too.
Any of the aforementioned libraries could make their camera smarter or improve Siri/OCR marginally. The fact that Apple wasted their time reinventing the wheel is what bothers me, they're making a mistake by assuming that their internal library will inherently appeal to developers and compete with the SOTA.
The reason why I criticize them is because I legitimately believe Apple is one of the few companies capable of shipping hardware that competes with Nvidia. Apple is their only competitor at TSMC, it's entirely a battle of engineering wits between the two of them right now. Apple is going nowhere fast with CoreML and Accelerate framework, but they could absolutely cut Nvidia off at the pass by investing in the unified infrastructure that Intel and AMD refuse to. It also wouldn't harm the customer experience, leverages third-party contributions to advance their progress, and frees up resources to work on more important things. Just sayin'.
They missed AI along with everyone else except for OpenAI and MS. But, it's hard to say they're being left behind when they have products that are the defining product of the category. Obviously there's the iPhone, but also AirPods, iPad, and Apple Watch.
And the ARM changeover in the laptops has been so seamless, people seem to ignore the huge risks with switching architectures. And now everyone is chasing them for the same power/battery life.
They've had some missteps, but we need a few more years to really know if they have been left behind. Apple was never one to be first to do something.
Without a doubt, they have one hell of an engineering team.
After a life on windows and some periods on linux, apple managed to refine their os and hardware to the point where I can say, it doesn’t get in the way and it “just works”, which, I think, is what most professionals want.
Seems to me they ran course of strategic layout set by Jobs and are cruising on play it safe and more of it now. Hence wide variety of the sameness in their product offerings. Cook is a good operative, but not a strategic visionary. As for what's the hot topic about, Apple was always heavy handed, only now is the era they got a chance to have that hand be real heavy.
Because Apple's share price growth now depends on services, not cool hardware.
The App Store monopoly generates billions in ad revenue from app vendors advertising their apps on search results. That will take a huge hit if there's an alternate app store they can potentially pay a lot less to gain exposure.
I find it amusing when Apple says they vet their developers and block those they don’t trust when you can’t even trust for them to not go through your public comments and bring it up against you.
This is hardly out of the blue. Epic's CEO testified how they not only premeditated breaking their contract with Apple, but arranged a PR campaign around it and orchestrated a 'grass roots' effort at the same time.
Blocking Fortnite updates on iOS devices was an inconvenience for users compared to terminating the use of an entire gaming marketplace due to the next round of vigilante contract violation by Epic.
Ok, but it's not like breaking a contract like this is unheard of. Apple did literally the same thing to Qualcomm, for example, back when they decided they didn't want to pay money for modems. "You said some bad words about us and decided that you didn't like the contract" is literally business. Companies are not people that you are doing a personal affront to.
A childish move, unexpected from such a company like apple especially with timing.
Which probably boils down to one overzealous middle/higher manager trying too hard to be a good boi for superiors to get extra bonus... I don't think it panned as expected. Otherwise apple corporate culture is quite rotten.
I don't think we can really know the potential of PWA, since most developers aren't going to put effort into PWAs if they won't work for a big chunk of the market. Apple is effectively strangling the technology on all platforms by refusing to support it on theirs.
> What's actually missing that's stopping this from working?
Proper support on all platforms. No point working on PWAs that have janky tooling (reason: see previous sentence) when they're only going to work decently on Android devices anyway.
So why would you build a native Android app if PWAs work better? There’s way more web developers than Android developers, and you would avoid the Play Store fees. Sound cheaper to me. What part of iOS is invalidating the value proposition for Android here?
You also didn’t answer what is missing. What is missing? What’s this insurmountable problem that’s solved everywhere else? Why is janky tooling attributable to Apple?
Try reading my post again, maybe? The tooling is pretty janky because no one does this yet. No point to torture yourself with janky tooling when you only get to target android anyway...
Again, not answering a thing but a making up a claim you aren't willing or able to support. How is this supposed web development tooling jankiness attributable to Apple today? Feature detection is a solved problem. What tooling are you even referring to? You aren't even trying to support this with a concrete claim. This is nonsense and you know it.
PWAs are the perfect scapegoat of infinite nebulous whining. The definition of a progressive web app might as well be "whatever Chrome has but Safari doesn't, no matter what year it is or how those features change, and no matter how terrible of an idea they might be even on Chrome".
> Proper support on all platforms. No point working on PWAs that have janky tooling (reason: see previous sentence) when they're only going to work decently on Android devices anyway.
If you need it spelled out for you:
* WebUSB
* WebBLE
* WebSerial
* WebGL
* Many more standards Apple refuses to implement because it would let developers break free of their walled garden
Without being able to target apple devices why would I, or anyone, bother using these technologies and invest in their tooling? Just make a native android app with quality tooling that's been around for a decade and be done with it.
Right, I wanted you to spell it out because I was expecting you to write that exact sort of nonsense. Your first three examples aren't even web standards they're experimental features in Chrome that not even Firefox supports. The fourth actually is supported by Safari/iOS. What missing standards are stopping you from writing Progressive WEB Apps? Be exact please.
And.... even if you wanted to build a serial-port enabled "Works only in Chrome" PWA today (lol, we both know you're not) there's no tooling jankiness stopping you from doing so, checking for `if ("serial" in navigator) { ... }` requires no tooling at all it's just plain javascript, you'd just choose to show an error message for browsers like Safari and Firefox that don't support it.
I'm not convinced you're even arguing in good faith here. Well, I never was because PWA whiners never are, but you've proven you're not.
It was mind-blowing to me that in previous threads, Apple fanatics were defending Apple, saying that Epic had broken the developer agreement. It hadn't. Schiller clearly stated that he banned Epic because he didn't believe Sweeney when Sweeney literally said that he would abide by the agreement. I don't see this behavior with any other company.
Not trying to start a flame war, I'm asking this earnestly. Where does this command over hardware (USB-C mandate), software (sideloading/AppStore), and prices (recent 2bn decision) end?
If only it were that simple!! Isn't the central problem that you're not allowed to sell in anybody elses house. I mean, if you're prepared to accept that you are leasing the device and that the lease will dictate what you can add can't do with the device, then I think your position holds, otherwise, it's a little tenuous.
It's not their house. Someone bought an iPhone (not leased, bought, they own it now). Someone else made an app that that person wants to install on their iPhone (solely thanks to app developer's own marketing efforts). But Apple thinks it's appropriate to have their finger in the pie too.
Now there are fewer (or none) apple followers defending the old argument: Apple is entitled to profit for their platform. Thank EU for Striking some sense on that.
That's what the $99/year fee is for. Apple set that price themselves. It can also be argued that some of the cost of the SDKs is included into the price of the Mac that any iOS developer has to have.
> or OS
That's included into the price of every iPhone because you can't even buy an iPhone without an OS or install your own, like you can do with PCs.
Does apple having designed, developed, and manufactured the phone as well as having built, maintained, and serviced the App store mean nothing?
The App store is a highly trusted place to download things on your phone, and that's a value that apple provides and that costs money to maintain. Pretending that it's as isolated as you pretend feels very disingenuous.
I'm an Android developer myself, but the app store is commonly seen by my iOS colleagues just as a stupid hurdle they must clear to get their app out to the world. Not as the godsend that Apple portrays it.
If the app store is truly as immensely useful as Apple wants everyone to believe, why not enable full-on Android-style sideloading on iOS and let the app store compete with that on its own merits? Surely everyone would still prefer it if it's so great?
This argument is trotted out frequently and it misses the point. These are NOT Apple’s customers. Yes they bought the phone from Apple but they are Epic’s customers. No one wants Apple inserting themselves in the middle of the transaction. It is not necessary.
If it were really that simple, we'd all be leasing AT&T cell phones. The only reason Apple can sell iPhones and run an app store is because AT&T got broken up 40 years ago for similar issues.
It ends when Apple learns to balance the interests of their shareholders and the interests of their customers better. I would go as far as saying that the way Apple banned even any mention of alternative payment methods for in-app services was clearly abusive and faudulent.
> It ends when Apple learns to balance the interests of their shareholders and the interests of their customers better.
The interests of their shareholders are literally the interests of their customers.
Apple makes incredible products, that billions of people pay significant money for, with many competitors that are much cheaper. Their shareholders reap the rewards of this.
If Apple customers hated Apple, they would not be Apple customers, and Apple would not be one of the most valuable businesses in human history.
> The interests of their shareholders are literally the interests of their customers.
There would be no need hide information from customers if that was true. Their censorship, the fact that Apple desperately wants to hide what they are doing, is very revealing and incriminating.
Per Apple’s rules, app developers are not allowed to explain the App Store rules and pricing models within their apps, leaving customers in the dark - a form of censorship, to be sure.
Not where, when. And the answer is never, because the EU regulates what companies themselves either can't regulate themselves because no one's willing to adopt the other's standard, or there's a position of dominance that doesn't even require collaborating with anyone else. And they do that for a pretty simple reason: to ensure that businesses do right by the EU citizenship.
And they do that across _all_ sectors of industry, you only noticed the tech one because it's in the news you pay attention to, but everything from farming to textiles to tech to pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated so that the people that live in the EU can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.
That's probably to generalised since the EU is still a political entity with lots of lobbying from different sides.
But in this case benefiting the general public is easy because it does not hit a European company ( production in China, development in America) that is working hard to extract money which it sends abroad while avoiding paying taxes here (probably legally).
A good opportunity to reign Apple and friends in and score some "greater good" points in particular since the US government is also sceptical and mostly concerned with internal affairs at the moment.
Apple is in the wrong here, at least in my opinion, but equating the ability to have a 2nd app store on your iPhone and the end of democracy is... wow.
He didn't say anything about the end of democracy. Apparently the media zeitgeist is so strong with this now that even just saying "Democracy" triggers the thought.
All he said is that it's the democratically elected officals that decide what laws companies have to obey. Just as they decide everything else about what what laws people have to obey.
I'm no lawyer, but it seems like it ends and begins at wanting to sell in the european market. It doesn't seem that different from mandating that cars obey certain emission standards, contain digital radios etc. Or how food packaging contain nutritional information. Mandating 2-year guarantees for sold goods. There's quite a lot of legislation on specific requirements on sold goods.
One can argue whether this specific legislation is wise, but legally i don't think there's any limit to what the EU can mandate for goods sold in their market.
Ideally, as a consumer, in a market where commodity computer hardware is not arbitrarily restricted to extract the maximum attainable profit from consumers? It has been shown time and again that both volunteers and competitors can quickly and easily build and ship software, including entire OS's that run on the hardware, the only thing preventing them from doing so is anti-consumer and anti-competitive controls.
It's asinine that I, as a consumer, can pay over $1000 for a device and not be able to choose which software I can run on it because the developer of that device locks out access. It's even worse that the company I bought it from can arbitrarily disable the device, features, and services that I have paid for, and I have little to no recourse.
The USB-C mandate is nothing to do with Apple. It’s ensure interoperability and reduce waste.
Setting standards is one of the oldest forms of regulation, ever since weights and measures were standardized to ensure people could trade more easily, ensuring that when you bought a pound of flour from one vendor it would be the same pound as the vendor across the street.
It probably ends with happy consumers :) At least, I'm very happy that the EU is trying to avert the worst anticompetitive behaviour and restoring my control over the hardware that I purchased.
I think tech, particularly the digital landscape, is one of the few industry that are not regulated. Everything else from transport to food has strict regulation. It's not like anyone can build housing whenever and however he wants in the US.
No, by being anti-competitive. Most countries have laws against monopolies, and it was naive to expect that countries would wait until you destroy the competition to enforce those laws.
Yes. It's the reality of capitalistic end game. You start with a great product, innovate for 30 years and then when you think you got it and can endlessly extract the rent from the market, while adding another megapixel and megaherz and buying out or bulling competitors, then the government knocks on your door and gives you the award of the biggest asshat in the town and asks to retire.
Congrats, you won, now let somebody else play the game and become a boring public utility. And by the way, your research lab is now a public university. And the taxes is what government does, not you.
Because the role of the government (in theory) is to use these taxes for public utility services and projects. Companies only care about their owners and shareholders, a very small subset of the population. If you're not contributing to society, but just profiteering, you should retire. Especially if your position lead you to have a say to what succeed or not in the economy.
My expectation is that a government would do an investigation first, but I believe that a split would look like this:
- The computing hardware company
- The accessory hardware company
- The operating system company
- The software company
- The cloud services company
- The app store company
- The music & video company
- The messaging company
For starters, it's Apple the phone making company, Apple the software making company and Apple the (software) distribution company. The cloud, the payment processing, the bank whatever else is there.
They can still be quite integrated, they just have to a allow a different distribution company compete without using the phone company's monopoly as a leverage against them and not use distribution company as a leverage to compete with other software developers i.e. pay the same 30% fee, bid for promotion in the store and use fair ranking in the search.
It's not the first time a huge corp gets split up once they reach end game and can't innovate in their own field anymore.
Anti competitive behavior? Over an App Store that’s only important because of the success of their phones. Phones that people don’t need to buy because there are alternatives? Miss me with actual harms being done.
Edit: Of course your anti-Apple bias shows and you downvote anything going against the circle jerk
You might disagree, but this is an Apple-specific behavior that does demonstrable harm to the market and consumers. Apple was flippant towards Dutch regulators when they were being investigated over this, and that negligence earned them scrutiny on a much larger stage. The further Apple doubles-down, the more legislative artillery the EU will dedicate to stopping them; this reversal on Epic's account is evidence that Apple doesn't see light at the end of their tunnel, they're not building a defensible case.
> I love that they’re willing to spend it on the EU’s frivolous bullshit.
As an Apple customer myself, I'd be much happier if they spent that money researching a way to charge the Magic Trackpad over USB-C. This is precisely the behavior that makes me ashamed to use Apple hardware.
No catch, just the threat of "and if you keep trying to violate EU law, we're going to keep levying billion dollar fines on you until you either obey the law, or you cease all operations in Europe. Which will get you sued some more because you're still on the hook for support after you leave"
> “Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”
It's more like the EC told both sides to get some adults in the room and work it out. Since they clearly didn't force Apple to change any rules and Epic agreed to follow Apple's rules, I have no idea where all this chest-beating is coming from. Apple is still winning and the EC is still feckless.
In the best case they are learning that, due to their own behaviour, they are now sharing custody of the EU app store with an adminstrative bureocracy.
But I suspect it'll take them more time until it fully sinks and until they are done testing their new boundaries.
You should probably do a few cuts with Hanlon's Razor in this case.
The simplest explanation for what happened with Apple this past few weeks is that there's no master plan. The EU told them the rules, they didn't take them seriously, now they're realizing a bit late that they can't afford not to respect the rules and they're scrambling to figure out what that means.
I never give any Big Tech with nation-state influence the benefit of the doubt. This is a legal/PR stress test. They failed this one, but they won't fail others.
> And the minimal assurances in Mr. Sweeney’s curt response were swiftly undercut by a litany of public attacks on Apple’s policies, compliance plan, and business model.
So according to Apple [edit] one isn't allowed to say bad things about a company publicly or they are allowed to ban your account? Interesting view.
At least in the U.S. business owners have the right to refuse service or turn away a customer to protect their patrons and business.
That's the issue with all these providers. Every couple of weeks there's a story from someone whose Google account was suddenly closed with no way to access their emails or pictures again.
Yes, and that's why monopolies must die, in practice desolved by governments.
Once you buy a smartphone today you and everybody who wants to do further business with you are at the mercy of a monopolist. For Apple 100%, for Google only 98% because you could side-load. But not a secure and practical solution today.
Maybe, in the context of smartphones as a whole. In the context of the App Store (which TFA is about), Apple is a gatekeeper and this is an instance of vendor-lockin. Technically not the same as a monopoly (because, as you mention, you can always use Android).
So you change your smartphone every time you are not happy with Apple or Google Android?
Yes, you have a choice once every couple of years while you might want to install an app several times a year. Free markets would also be the wrong word to describe the situation.
I think monopoly is the right word because their really are two markets.
A customer is only looking for either iOS or Android apps, and isn't going to choose an Android app if they have an iPhone, or vice versa (IOW, iOS apps don't compete with Android apps).
Imagine only one company sold diesel fuel, and only one sold gasoline. Wouldn't you say they each had a monopoly?
This is an example of vendor lockin, which is a troubling practice that needs to be stopped, but it is legally and practically distinct from monopoly as defined in antitrust legislation.
We shouldn't limit our use of language based on laws written 100 years ago. It's pretty clear that those laws are inadequate to restrain the monopolies that exist now.
Said another way, you might be right about US antitrust law, but when that law was written the technology didn't exist to create "vendor lock-in" on millions of products at once.
I am curious about the example though, from a legal perspective. Would the only seller of gasoline have a monopoly, even if other fuels were available, and the only barrier to using them was the switching cost of buying a new vehicle?
Edit: For what it's worth, wikipedia uses the word monopoly when "a single vendor controls the market for the method or technology being locked in to".
You are correct, although there’s plenty of room for Apple to engage in evil anti-competitive behavior without having a monopoly over any sanely defined market. EU regulators seem to think they’ve crossed that threshold!
Right; I think the correct frame is, major operating systems are utilities. They must be regulated the same way that all systemically important utilities are regulated; heavily. Monopolies are natural, and arguably desirable, with utilities; but they need to be subject to extremely strong regulation to maintain the right balance.
The DMA was always phrased from the wrong perspective (which is just classic EU, they literally cannot ever get regulation right). The correct phrasing is: once a computer operating system achieves a certain level of market adoption (say, 50M+ active installations), it is designated as a systemically critical operating system. Among other regulations, one thing systemically critical operating systems must allow is the independent and unrestricted installation and execution of applications from the internet.
Regulating the market (App Store) itself is just dumb. Apple should not be forced to have Epic Games as a customer. It destroys trust in the App Store's review process, and legitimately does from my perspective infringe on Apple's rights as a business to do business with partners as they please. There's a gulf of difference between "forcing the App Store to distribute some application" and "allowing that application to be freely distributed on the internet". Regulation should be specifically targeted toward the second situation; and leave the App Store alone.
While this is an interesting idea and I personally would welcome such regulation it probably wouldn't solve the problem the EU is trying to address.
Android allows the installation of alternative app stores but Google still retains large effective control over the app market.
I would argue that the EU recognised that and therefore regulated Operating systems and app stores because the former one isn't enough apparently.
If things continue along this trajectory we may see the utility argument at the store level and at the OS level.
Looking at how the electric power distribution industry is regulated it already works like this (at least here in Germany).
On the one hand grid operators are heavily regulated (as you say) and must allow companies without infrastructure to resell power to end customers.
On the other hand the actual owner of the last mile infrastructure is also forced to do business with all customers and has very little freedom to refuse(e.g. non-payment is a temporary valid reason).
We may very well see something similar in the software distribution market since it's becoming such an integral part of life.
The power of Apple and Google is literally monopoly power. As in, government-granted copyright and patents that allow the holders to restrain the conduct of competitors.
Decades ago people were crying out against it, but nobody with power listened because they thought we just wanted to steal music[0]. Well, we did, but that didn't make us wrong. Now the world economy is owned by a handful of oligopolist-elected dictators who have maximally exploited the laws in question to make meaningful competition literally illegal.
No, seriously, try and ship a phone without big tech's blessing. It won't work. Hell, Amazon and Microsoft both tried and failed. Everyone only writes apps for Google Play and iOS, and any attempt to make them work elsewhere is a criminal felony.
[0] To be clear, their real concern was finding ways to legally bind China to pay us for "our IP" on pain of being shut out of world markets. Dictatorship is fractal.
Conversation needs to shift to "market power" which is where the EU has gone. The fact that Apple shares the App store market with Android evenly in terms of users for example is meaningless when they nonetheless hold the vast majority of the influence through their market power.
It is a double-edged sword. A right to refuse service is great when you have an unruly patron in a pub or restaurant that is ruining the evening for everybody else. But on the other side it is really easy for a company like Google to just kill your smaller company because they decided they do not want to allow you access to an account anymore.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of this whole issue is watching people with a vested political interest in Apple's fundamental point of view criticize their dealings with Epic.
> But on the other side it is really easy for a company like Google to just kill your smaller company because they decided they do not want to allow you access to an account anymore.
It sounds like the problem isn't Google being able to refuse service, but instead that Google doing that has the power to kill your smaller company. No one company should be allowed to have the power to decide which companies live or die.
If you found a company that depends on Google APIs or products, that's a risk your company carries. I don't see why we need legislative intervention to mitigate such risks.
If I founded a company that specializes in manufacturing Pokemon toys under contract, and Nintendo (for whatever reason) pulls the contract, it's perfectly normal for the business to no longer be viable and to be liquidated.
Rules should be different if you're running a platform. A platform is essentially a market within the free market, so special regulative care is required.
This is very problematic when monopolies are involved. “You are banned from Taco Bell for the rest of your life” is very different from “You are banned from all restaurants anywhere for the rest of your life.”
If all restaurants are Taco Bell, is it reasonable to allow such bans by taco bell?
Actual monopolies (utility companies forex) are required to do business with people. Utility companies which almost always are regional monopolies have to deal with customers so long as bills are paid. There's also processes for halting service in the case of non-payment. The utility can't cut your power because you were mean to them on Twitter.
Apple is not a monopoly anywhere on the planet and has no such requirement.
> At least in the U.S. business owners have the right to refuse service or turn away a customer to protect their patrons and business.
But this is not about Apple's right as a company to refuse any business with Epic, they still have that right.
This is about Apple not complying with a law that targets them due to their anti-competitive behavior; a law that requires them to give the means to operate an App Store competitor to anyone who requests it.
Apple is the one who decided to require an Apple developer account in order to operate an App Store competitor, so they effectively gave up their right to refuse any business with Epic by adding this unnecessary requirement.
As was said, this is normal in the US. Private businesses can refuse service to anyone for any reason. There's that paint color that is allowed to be used by all but one person because the inventor doesn't like them.
On the other hand, I'm definitely not saying this is okay or sane just because it's standard practice in the US. It's also how we got legalized segregation and we had to pass laws carving out exceptions to create protected classes such that you're not allowed to refuse service because a person is black, for instance. Just doing this splintered the country and created the modern GOP with its southern strategy.
So it's nice to see these large web companies having to respect the laws of other jurisdictions and not just the US with its hallowed history of property rights over all else, going all the way back to chattel slavery. If the EU can force saner norms on the web, I'm all for it.
Indeed. I think this "Private businesses can refuse service to anyone for any reason." as been repeated so many times, that a lot of people think of it almost as a tautology.
In particular in this case, we have many pass example where even in the US, companies have be found to violate anti trusts law be either refusing or strongly conditioning doing business with a third-party.
Hey now, they’d have to read all the way to the second paragraph to get to the nuance. You can’t expect people to read two paragraphs before starting to argue.
They present prior art on both sides of the issue then provide their interpretation of the matter. If that’s bad writing, then so is every court decision ever.
> So according to Apple [edit] one isn't allowed to say bad things about a company publicly or they are allowed to ban your account? Interesting view.
No, according to Apple, they believed Epic was going to violate their developer agreement again, and when they asked Sweeney for a commitment he sent them a two sentence email. His public actions were only a modifier on top of his seeming lack of committal and previous history of being a bad actor on Apple’s platform.
Spotify says bad things about Apple all the time, but they've never been banned because they've never violated Apple's rules.
I’m not defending Apple’s stance here, but I think the point they were making is that Epic had already admitted to intentionally breaking their previous agreements with Apple for their own gain. The court then ruled that Apple could ban Epic for any reason. Sweeney essentially called the new terms illegitimate while at the same time entering a new agreement where those terms applied to Epic. It’s somewhat understandable that, when seeing that, Apple would not trust Epic to not intentionally break the rules again.
I personally think it’s silly to believe that Apple cares even a little about Epic’s criticism. They probably thought they had a legitimate case that would let them stomp out a potential big App Store competitor before it could get off the ground.
They believed in good faith that Apple's terms were illegal. There is nothing wrong with breaking an illegal contract. Yes, they lost in court but it wasn't a foregone conclusion. Apple's continuing retaliation is petty and likely to get them in trouble.
Oh yeah, forbidding developers from telling their customers that they can buy a subscription for less money in their website is definitely not illegal.
The fact that Apple is now regulated is definitely not a symptom of the illegality of their terms. Definitely not.
Google and Facebook are among others now regulated as well.
The European Economic Zone sets regulations around economic policy. Their creation of the DMA was that while the markets did not have monopolistic abuse, that there were areas that still did not have _enough_ competition.
Now I would argue the DMA is misguided, because they are basically trying to regulate in a counter to the network effect. The problem is (for example) that even with barriers lowered, an upstart messaging app cannot compete with WhatsApp because they still cannot grow by the network effects the way WhatsApp did, because WhatsApp already exists and is popular. An upstart will still have to already be on target to become larger than WhatsApp in order to supplant them.
Alternative Marketplaces have been possible on Android for years and really haven't succeeded except in markets where Google Play is unavailable. Why would developers put time and effort into being where nobody is? How does anything in the DMA change their minds - better transaction fees on no sales?
The DMA does give companies an opportunity to innovate, such as how MacPaw is going to have a SetApp Marketplace which is a subscription service for mostly utility apps (similar to Apple Arcade as a first-party marketplace for games). But I would argue there is no way SetApp will be as popular as the App Store - it is a business opportunity, not market competition. I would say this is akin to F-Droid - it is an alternative marketplace on Android, but not one that really competes with Play.
> There is nothing wrong with breaking an illegal contract.
It is not an illegal contract. It is a contract that Epic _hopes_ is illegal.
I don't get to ignore my home mortgage payments without consequence even if I believe in my truest of heart that giving money to a bank is wrong. In this metaphor, Apple here is the bank saying that Epic has a habit of not paying back loans, and has publicly stated how they think the loan they are applying for is 'hot garbage'.
Epic didn't just feel it was "wrong". They had legal arguments with merit. And they did prevail in one of them, so in fact the contract was illegal in part. Equating legitimate legal disputes with simply not paying your mortgage for no good reason is absurd.
Amazing how fast this decision was reversed. It's truly awesome to see regulators standing up to walled gardens. This will greatly benefit both developers and consumers.
I don't know what the op is referring to but just a guess. I know one app, HelloTalk where I think you can get paid to teach language. Think of it as zoom + twitch but centered around language learning. You can run a channel (twitch style) and you can take private "zoom" calls for money. Apple is probably taking 30% for those calls.
They aren’t a single person. There are no doubt people in those orgs who might wish to do away with all the anticompetitive strongarmsmanship in the spirit of shared technological innovation. But, its not like they have agency to change anything and the shareholders just want a growth stock not actual technological progress, so thats how they end up managed.
I liken good regulation as a way to prevent markets from getting stuck in a local maxima. That's generally what people mean from "saving them from themselves.
More similar in that they force them to obey the regulations, yes. But regulations cover things like interoperability & anti-competitive behaviour, and here retaliatory actions. I'd very much like _all_ choices to be forced to behave the same w.r.t. not being able to retaliate against protected action, or all be forced to follow the same laws.
But we’re not in a situation where there are very few sports, where many people complain about the lack of choice in sports, and where regulators are attempting to eliminate one of the very few meaningful differences between the existing choices.
There are plenty of ways to differentiate in a competitive market. Good regulations set baselines for fair play, both toward customers and competitors. Whether or not that makes some aspects of those choices more similar isn't really relevant. Or if it is, it's because it makes them similar in good ways. Ways that are pro-customer and pro-competition, but they won't do unless legally required.
I agree that there are plenty of ways competitors could differentiate themselves. But in the current market, I think there are very few competitors, and even fewer ways they currently differentiate themselves. And the most notable recent regulations would eliminate one of the more meaningful differentiations.
I would rather that developers do not have the choice to choose an app store where anything goes.
It’s funny how when Apple threatens a European company the EC can act within days, but when a German company is violating the GDPR, it takes 4 years for them to act. What a strange coincidence.
> I would rather that developers do not have the choice to choose an app store where anything goes.
That's not up to you. What you get to decide is which stores you're willing to install apps from. If lots of people refuse to install apps from unrestrictive stores then developers who want to reach those users will have to meet the requirements of more restrictive stores.
You would only not have this choice if the app has a dominant market position, and then can force you to get it from a store you don't want to use. But then your problem isn't an overabundance of trust busting, it's an insufficiency of it.
Other titans tried, they all failed to capture. Blackberry lagged for too long and Microsoft simply lacked the network effects since early advertisement was based on how large the app stores were.
The only solace is that you can modify Android to the point where there's almost no Google interference whatsoever. But of course some apps choose to rely on that (e.g. Banking).maybe one day Apple will begrudgingly get to that point.
Microsoft execs had their heads buried too deep in their own asses to be able to understand what was needed at the time.
They pushed a platform (Windows phone) that lacked interesting features out of the box, lacked cloud services integration to fill the gap left by the lacking base features, and required Windows as a development platform (and, iirc, C# as well?). It didn't even have any particular windows-ecosystem speciality: no special exchange integration, no special windows pc integration, nothing. Microsoft could have exploited the same reasons they exploited with Azure, Office365 and the general enterprise: microsoft phones should just integrates perfectly with other microsoft stuff. It could have been the no-brainer choice: we use ActiveDirectory and Office365 as a suite, we'll get a Windows Phones as everything just works immediately. No, nobody had thought of that.
The value proposition was just not there.
So basically another walled garden, but dumber. And the hardware didn't have anything special to make it "worth".
I think there’s more to it than this, and it’s subtle: The iPhone was cool.
Seriously, the original iPhone had little going for it technically. No GPS, poor data bandwidth, no apps, and minimal ability to make phone calls. (It took the combined efforts of Apple and AT&T a couple generations before you could reliably place a call.)
But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth. It could zoom. And Steve Jobs marketed it well, whereas Steve Ballmer was terrible at marketing.
IMO the iPhone was considerably worse for business use than Windows Mobile, and neither one held a candle to the BlackBerry. But it didn’t matter.
> But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth.
Basically an observation that consumers were interested in digital media players, which Apple had some expertise in building (iPods, for younger folks).
And that a usable browser was a killer feature (most of the web not having reactive mobile sites, and no apps, then).
And if you combined all of the above with a cell phone, customers would rather carry 1 device than the 3 it previously took.
> iPhone had little going for it technically. No GPS, poor data bandwidth, no apps, and minimal ability to make phone calls.
Things that apparently were not that important at launch. Apple did negotiate "unlimited" data plans with Cingular/AT&T.
> But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth
Better UI, better media playback, web browser that worked. Sounds like a classic example of Apple taking what is out there and simply doing it better.
Windows Phone (as opposed to Windows Mobile, which was basically moribund at the time the iPhone came out, and was replaced with the incompatible Windows Phone) wasn’t competing with the original iPhone; it came out shortly after the iPhone 4.
IMO the real problem with Windows Phone was the complete failure to produce an actual platform. Windows Phone 7 was incompatible with Windows Mobile, and _Windows Phone 8 was largely incompatible with Windows Phone 7_! The whole thing was comically developer hostile.
(Second mistake; Windows Phone 7’s UI ran at 30fps, presumably in an attempt to save battery. This made it feel a lot worse than iOS and Android.)
Microsoft failed because they weren't persistent enough. When you are the third entry in the market, you need to stay on the race and improve. Windows phone was profitable - $3.8 billion in a quarter using Lumias. But Nadella wanted to make Microsoft a cloud services company and leave the OS behind, so he axed the Phone.
Now, Apple is achieving per-eminance in the cross-device consumer OS market in the latop+tablet+smartphone space and Windows is slowly dying. Microsoft will just set to become yet another boring cloud services company.
> Apple is achieving per-eminance in the cross-device consumer OS market in the latop+tablet+smartphone
Only in the US and global high-end market. This is an extremely profitable market to be leading and I'm not trying to minimize Apple's achievement, but globally relatively few people use their phones and tablets, and ever fewer use their traditional computers.
Apple has a sizable lead, but I think the "idea" of what a smartphone is has been locked in essentially in the mind of consumers and their technological lead will only last so long as time passes. They are Microsoft but of smartphones and 20 years younger than windows desktop PCs. They know this, which is why they constantly make new things and try to develop new products (vr headsets, etc).
MS beat Apple to market by a considerable margin. Windows Mobile substantially predates the iPhone, and it was actually usable. (I had one of their flagship devices.)
But MS’s OS concept was incoherent, their UI was laggy, their web browser was unbearably slow despite arguably superior hardware, their form factor was not snazzy. And, unlike Apple, they utterly failed at marketing to consumers.
Also, Apple out their foot down against carrier nonsense, so Apple users didn’t have to deal with $14.99/mo for Verizon Location or whatever they called it. (Although, to be fair, the original iPhone didn’t have GPS. Blackberry had far superior hardware at the time and really ought to have been able to compete, but they didn’t.)
By the time the App Store showed up, it was pretty clear that Apple was beating MS.
blackberry didn't seem to care about regular consumers until it was to late, instead relying on corporate customers and relying on integration with enterprise messaging software.
windows was well windows 8 and everyone hated it and everything about it. (and pre-windows phone 8 it was to fragmented with to many incompatible versions and little 3rd party support)
Palm/HP WebOS was the real mobile OS with the best chance to win but failed because well HP... need i say more.
> blackberry didn't seem to care about regular consumers until it was to late, instead relying on corporate customers and relying on integration with enterprise messaging software.
Has trapped so many businesses.
Enterprise customers can afford to pay enough to support good profit margins...
... but there are many more regular consumers, and regular consumer demands tend to produce better solutions than baroque enterprise demands (usually company- or VP-specific).
I think a lot of lessons learned around iPhone 2007-2012 have to do with looking at the elephant in the room.
Blackberry was doing great with keyboards and refused to sell more of. Windows Mobile had tons of muscles as market share they just trimmed off. Windows Phone had Marketplace trust issue that couldn't be solved. Nokia burned itself down before Google. Palm did most of it right, but couldn't be bothered with exclusivity reneg.
I can't say solving any one of them could have saved each of the brands, but they all had one giant elephant each that were enough to drag them down.
A PalmOs user myself, I remember thinking the iPhone should have had no chances against the Palms.
Although, might be the reason I went the Android way when that arrived;-)
> Also, Apple out their foot down against carrier nonsense
This is the main point, not the "also". Apple's revolution was actually getting it in the hands of real life consumers who paid for cell phone plans. The tech was already there with blackberry, but you had to have business to afford it. Yes, the original iPhone itself was a technical marvel, but it would have been a dead fish if it wasn't for the at& t deal that came out as part of it.
Other phones that predated the iPhone release had more capabilities and more software. There was nothing really "marvelous" about the original iPhone, it was many years behind Microsoft.
The HTC Wizard was a "technical marvel" in 2005. Apple was playing catch-up in 2007.
You're right. The "technical marvel" of the iPhone was the size of its battery. Treo's and Blackberry's were already there with the hardware. But the software. Apple's pretty good with software, so their implementation also made a difference.
The iPhone had a non-removable battery, which was a step backwards for consumers. And there was nothing special about it.
At the time I had an HTC TyTN 2 phone that did everything the iPhone could do and more, and had a removable battery, about the same size as the battery inside the iPhone 1. If you look at photos of the TyTN 2 battery, and the iPhone 1 battery, they are very close to the same size.
There was very little difference between those batteries. The TyTN 2 had a 1350mA hour lithium battery. The iPhone 1 had a 1400mA hour lithium battery. Practically no difference there in size or capacity.
So, no, the iPhone's battery was not a "technical marvel" any more than other phones of that era.
And in fact Apple's was a step back by being non-removable. I absolutely loved having a removable battery, because I could bring 2 or 3 with me on a long trip and never have to charge the phone. Apple was less functional in that way.
I can't comment on the TyTN2, but I'm thinking back to Blackberry employees (CEO?) saying
> "The iPhone "couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."
That's your rebuttal?? The engineers at blackberry were pretty inept and stuck in the past, which is why they're no longer in business. That article contributes nothing towards your claim that the first iPhone was a "technical marvel". I cited an example of a phone released in 2007 that had the same battery tech that Apple had. Was that also a "technical marvel"? And the model before it and the one before that? Apple didn't do anything groundbreaking in the first iPhone except maybe a capacitive touchscreen, which wasn't anything they invented, they were around long before the iphone.
This was a marketing and perception issue, not a price issue. When the original iPhone came out, I had a very nice blackberry, with a personal plan, effectively unlimited data, and the full blackberry suite (minus corporate integration, obviously). And I think it was less expensive than the iPhone plan. But it was a pain in the neck! I had to pick the correct phone plan, add the correct data supplement, negotiate the correct discount (basically everyone was eligible for a discount, but you had to find your particular reason for being eligible in a ridiculous menu), and then convince the sales person to add the special $3.99/mo supplement for blackberry services. It clearly never occurred to anyone involved that this was not a competent way to sell to consumers!
I did make fun of my friends for paying several dollars more per month for a device with no keyboard, no GPS, slower data, less efficient text input, and dramatically worse performance in marginal network conditions.
When I finally switched to an iPhone 3G, I could do real in the browser, but wow, the ability to make phone calls was seriously downgraded. I feel like my old blackberry may have had the best behaved cellular modem of any smart device I’ve ever owned.
I think that, if RIM had gotten YouTube and a music player working, had improved the web browser, and stuck a capacitive touch sensor on their device, and if they had marketed it competently (make it so that customers could walk into a store, pay $55/mo, and walk away with a working device without a fight!), they might have remained competitive.
Microsoft repeatedly tried to put Windows on a phone and it didn’t stick.
Apple didn’t bother, they used an entirely different UI from the start, and it was a UI aimed at everyone from kids to grandparents, not just tech people.
There's always the risk that mobile phones supersedes the desktop, and thus cannibalize the desktop windows sales. Microsoft also likely not able to force OEM licensing in the same way that they could with windows on PC sellers.
If you could literally run windows apps on a phone back then, i reckon the MS phones would've at least grabbed some marketshare. Of course, the mobile hardware back then isn't as powerful, so there's the excuse that win32 cannot run there.
> This is one of those things where there is only upside for everyone involved.
Except all of us who value privacy and security.
Face it: the major competition between app stores is not going to be on price, but a race to the bottom on who can allow apps to fuck over users the hardest.
You really think Apple is just going to abandon everything it believes in and trash their brand in a race to the bottom?
If there's one company I don't expect that from, it's Apple. They may have highly dubious ethics but they are damn good at business and marketing, and I would be utterly shocked if they don't position themselves as the safe, privacy-friendly official app store. For people who don't enable side-loading, I wouldn't expect they'll even notice any changes.
It's not whether Apple will, it's the other developers that you might not have a choice to interact with. Sure, in the tech space, we're all imagining the great open source on iOS revolution. Gamers are anticipating their Fortnite.
And I'm sure Facebook is anticipating not having to ask for permission to hoover up all your personal data. Sure you don't need facebook, but if you want to be using WhatsApp to communicate with your friends and family, you might not have a choice. Shady companies that sell shady spyware to schools "for the children" are looking forward to a much easier time rolling out the most invasive ideas they have. The ad companies are I'm sure salivating over telemetry libraries with extra detailed modes for non-Apple app store installations.
That would certainly be an interesting turn of events if major apps like Facebook or Whatsapp decided to d-list from the app store and require their own store. Given Apple's current heavy fees and disincentives to do that, I'm guessing epic is probably the only company that will. I think a lot of people would refuse to install an alternative app store to get most apps.
But most of all, I look at Android where alternative app stores are possible with essentially no cost, and even with Amazon's enormous resources behind it, they could not get an alternative app store to catch on. I can't think of any reason why it would be different on iOS, so ultimately I suppose I expect this to go nowhere and a few years from now there will be the epic game store and the main app store and everything for nearly everybody will just be on the app store like it is now. The alternative stores will just have the apps that Apple wouldn't approve, like porn apps or privacy invasive, etc
> Facebook or Whatsapp decided to d-list from the app store and require their own store.
Considering this hasn't happened on Android yet, I doubt you are in real trouble. Like it's not that they can really gain extra permissions (other than I guess tracking anything the app already has access to, but that isn't any different than currently) because they are sandboxed by the OS and limited in access through the permission system... I HOPE? RIGHT? @APPLE
And on the side of other app stores: there is F-Droid which is decently popular for OSS apps.
Android app stores failed because there's actually not much of a need for middlemen: you can just get an APK from the source, like you would on Windows.
As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't plan to let this happen.
I don’t think the EU should be able to say what Apple or Google can or cannot do in terms of their products. You don’t see the US constantly fining Airbus.
Why not? They tell US car makers what their products should do. The same for fruit growers, clothes makers and thousands of other businesses selling into the common market. It's called regulation and it's a normal part of modern life.
We're a society of laws and they apply equally to everyone. If you don't like the laws either vote accordingly, talk to your representative, organise a political action, or leave for a more agreeable jurisdiction.
I find it funny them bringing up aviation companies when it feels like every month Boeing appears in the news for something falling off their plan while in flight, be it doors or wheels. That is what happens when you let companies "do what ever they want" and mind you aviation is VERY REGULATED.
According to the article it was because Epic met with Apple and gave better assurances that they'd play ball rather than deliberately break their contract like they did last time.
Regulators don't seem to have had anything to do with it.
---
So what changed? Apple tells 9to5Mac that it has held further discussions with Epic. The result is that Apple has received proper commitment that Epic will play by the rules as legally defined.
“Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”
Honestly what you describe seems to be an attempt by Apple PR to save face.
They fear the spotlight on the fact that even on alternate stores only accounts controlled by Apple can publish apps, which might become the focus of new regulations
Regulators immediately started calling for an investigation and we're going to look into Apple’s termination of Epic’s developer account as a matter of priority.
The EU did say that they would look into this. Several articles in all the usual places. Doubt they got far enough to actually consider a fine, though.
Two days ago I wrote that didn't fully trust Epic's version of the events posted on EpicGames.com, and by the same logic I'm sure not going to trust Apple's version as posted to 9to5Mac.com
"""Even with screenshots, and assuming no false claims (which IIRC are entirely legal so long as you don't swear under oath), there's plenty of ways to mislead by omission while saying only true things.""" — works just as well in either direction.
Regulators have to look closely, if they take it on trust it's one Tim's word vs. the others'.
> I wrote that didn't fully trust Epic's version of the events posted on EpicGames.com, and by the same logic I'm sure not going to trust Apple's version
This fallacy plays out a lot in politics. "Epic has lied in the past, so all parties involved must be lying."
I can't take both of them on faith alone, because at least one of them must be wrong. I'm not qualified to decide between them, so I should weight them equally. Public statements from the parties, or fans of the parties, are reasonable to suspect of being tactical with the truth even when no falsehoods are stated, rather than giving a complete picture.
FWIW I found your parent comment to be quite clear. I think it's only hard for people with a black & white/good & evil view on the world to consider that maybe both parties in a conflict might not be entirely pure/perfect.
It was quite clear, just a bad take. If you have a coworker Bob that lies about everything at work, you can't use that as justification to treat Fred like he is always lying with no evidence.
Epic makes false statements because they have a megalomaniac CEO running the show, Apple on the other hand generally tries to avoid legal and PR troubles and has multiple teams of lawyers who review every public statement on an issue.
Not fully the truth, however -- according to APPLE, who are quoted in this one article. Tim Sweeny tweeted that the change was due to the EU DMA political proponents applying pressure to Apple.
The truth is not known, and it's not limited to Apple's side.
> Thierry Breton, the EU’s industry chief, said regulators had warned Apple about the iPhone maker’s move earlier this week to block Epic’s potential return.
> “I take note with satisfaction that following our contacts Apple decided to backtrack its decision on Epic exclusion. From Day 2, #DMA is already showing very concrete results!” Breton said on Twitter/X.
We can't be certain it was the EU's pressure that made Apple react, but anything else seems rather unlikely.
It's unlikely that "regulators" had anything to do with it, given the quick resolution. I'd be more inclined to think that Epic went back to Apple hat-in-hand and begged to be let back in, probably promising to muzzle Sweeney.
It's good scrutiny to have, but I'm surprised that there are now at leat 3 users here that really believe that Apple reversed course in 3 days out of the goodness of their hearts. I can't even get a response from many customer services in 3 days. No company thst big turns on a dime without extreme arm twisting.
Can confirm. I've been waiting for Apple's developer support to reply to me since before this debacle. I finally got a response 2 hours ago – after I resolved my issue – that stated they are busy right now.
> The EU told Apple that breaking the law would have dire consequences. That's the only reason Apple backed down.
You have no idea that this is what happened. You're the one spreading propaganda.
Why propagandize it at all?
EPIC hates Apple and wants to see the App store dead. Apple reasonably didn't trust EPIC not to play games with the DMA. The EU asked EPIC to give an assurance that they would play by the rules and then forced Apple to accept that assurance. Neither of them won anything. Apple is forced to let EPIC in, and EPIC is forced to accept that Apple is complying with the DMA.
That fits the facts. EPIC isn't a good guy. Apple isn't a good guy. The EU isn't a hero. Why try to paint any of them this way?
>It's unlikely that "regulators" had anything to do with it, given the quick resolution.
Disagree. EU regulators act quickly.
Here's the commissioner for Internal Market of the Eu:
"I take note with satisfaction that following our contacts Apple decided to backtrack its decision on Epic exclusion. From Day 2, #DMA is already showing very concrete results!"
https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464
Yes very unlikely, that Apple didn't want to try out the new 10% penalty of global turnover, after the commission said she is looking into it and days after Apple was bonked with a 1.8bn fine for violating antitrust regulations
> “Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”
This needs to be higher up. Apple didn't budge, or cave, and regulators did not get involved.
Epic could have avoided all this by just responding to Apple and signing the EU Addendum affirming they would stick to the laws. Instead they wanted to get into the news cycle.
It is incredibly naive to suggest that someone with that power "sending a letter asking questions" would be remotely similar to you or I doing the same.
The EU has an long tradition of "conversations" and "questions" with an unstated "give the right answer and you can avoid an unpleasant official action".
You're right there is no official casework. That is also entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether or not Apple caved under pressure.
No. We're thinking about a government that doesn't rush into potentially irreversible actions without working out a solution for a problem with the parties involved.
The “probe” here would be, at least in the first instance, usually mostly letters asking questions. Note that it is “reportedly”; the media didn’t find this out because the DOJ had a banner on its website saying “we are investigating an alleged glass house”. That comes later, if things are not resolved.
You’ve clearly never interacted with a regulator before. When a regulator send you a letter with difficult questions, there is an extremely strong implication that a failure to answer those questions correctly will lead to more difficult questions, and, undoubtedly, official investigations.
You don’t want an official investigation, they are a complete nightmare that eat up months of work hours. Much better to spend a couple of days making sure you can give the correct answers on the first pass. Unless of course you genuinely believe the regulators are pushing beyond their remit, but know you’re voluntary signing up for an expensive and protracted fight.
_Most_ regulatory enforcement, in practice, is “letters asking questions”. The formal cases you see are generally where the response to the letters was unsatisfactory.
(In some cases this is itself somewhat formalised.)
Yes, the EU immediately stepped in and explained them what the consequences of breaking the law would be, and Apple budged, caved, backed down. Not getting out of this one.
You have no idea that this is what happened. You are literally just making this up.
It's entirely possible the regulator asked EPIC to make an assurance that they would comply with Apple's rules, which are legal under the DMA, and then told Apple they'd need to accept the assurance.
If EPIC does now pull a stunt like they did in the US, the EU will now have reason to treat them with suspicion, and Apple will be able to point to the assurance as evidence that they accepted Apple's rules.
That only makes sense if we assume Apple’s world class legal team didn’t see what every lay person could. Rolling back the decision is not going to get them out of the eyes of the regulators and they must have assumed that going into it. Why give the EU even more ammo against you.
My guess is that they saw that all happening but Epic provided them a letter saying they double pinky promised, cross their hearts, will obey by the rules this time, which Apple will later try to use in court later on. Otherwise it doesn’t seem worth the risk prompting clearly foreseeable regulator action.
> That only makes sense if we assume Apple’s world class legal team didn’t see what every lay person could.
Apple banned Epic the day before DMA came into effect when doing this sort of thing was still legal, they 100% saw this. They did probably bet on the chance EU would overlook it if they did it before the law came into effect, they lost that bet but they thought it was worth a try.
The DMA has been in force since November 2022 and became applicable in 2023.
There was a grace period for compliance for companies found in violation, because that determination was made after it came into force, not before.
You can't find a company to violate a regulation that's not in force, and it's reasonable to give a company in violation of complex piece of law (that's never been tested) some period to comply.
But that doesn't mean the law is not already in force.
Or maybe Apple is not infallible, they took a shot because they are very arrogant and thought they could get away with it, and it failed miserably because now there is a law which makes their abusive behaviors illegal?
I think you're probably right, but in fairness to Apple it is reasonable to expect that the future will resemble the past. They've been wildly successful with their abusive behaviors in the past, so it probably was reasonable to think they might get away with it this time. I can't think of any company that gets more of a pass and has people willfully take up their PR releases as gospel truth than Apple.
I sure that Apple world class legal team saw everything you think they saw. But thing is, Apples legal team only provides legal _advise_, they don’t make decisions like this. There’s absolutely nothing preventing a senior leader getting perfectly good legal advice, and choosing to simply ignore it.
After all, legal advice can usually be summed up as “if you do anything, someone can fuck you”, and do nothing isn’t a good business strategy.
> That only makes sense if we assume Apple’s world class legal team didn’t see what every lay person could
Legal doesn't make decisions like this. That's not what they are paid to do.
Legal advises the executives of the consequences of decisions like this.
And if there's one thing that you should expect from people in positions of incredible power (executives), it's that they often believe that they are immune to the consequences of their decisions.
Most of the time they are right. Sometimes, they are not.
Companies often push their luck with regulators, because sometimes it works, and, as here, the consequences for failure often aren’t significant. For practical purposes Apple’s back where they were a week ago; from their point of view why _not_ chance their arm?
That Addendum has caused considerable consternation among game developers and — to my knowledge — few are prepared to sign it.
The main points of contention are:
- the technology fee (the cost of advertising has already cut badly into their margins in the wake of identifier reform);
- the clause making the Addendum also binding on any corporate parents and subsidiaries — the game industry is pretty consolidated and this limits the options for independent game studios which are also subsidiaries;
The fee is particularly nasty for hypercasual games, where a very realistic scenario has you paying for millions of installs, only to find your monetization lacking and you paying additional fees to the platform, of all things.
There are very real concerns with the Addendum and making signing only about Epic’s bona fides is reductive and wrong.
This is Apple's propaganda to try and save face. What happened is the EU stepped in and explained to them what the consequences of breaking the DMA would be.
Apple backed down, like they did a week ago with PWAs.
It’s not clear that’s the case. Speculation on the HN thread when it happened was that there had been back channel talk with the EU to clarify that this wouldn’t be the case.
There are two sides to EU directive compliance: Commission action and legal action through the European Court of Justice.
Apple can talk to the Commission all they want and persuade them not to take action. However, they cannot bend the ECJ's ear. If someone forces the issue through the courts (yes, it's a slow procedure and yes the ECJ can choose not to pick up a case, but that's down to the skills of the involved legal heads), what will matter is the directive as written.
Apple will likely continue to drag their feet, but the outcome looks fairly inevitable. It might well come when we've all moved on to "AI, show me data" instead of using browsers, but it will very likely come.
So? They removed them without any announcement for two weeks (hoping no one would notice), then officially announced it on their website when the backlash was growing.
They then backed down after Open Web Advocacy ran surveys, an open letter and the EU started a investigation.
Why would they announce if it's a beta? For all we know it could have been a bug or something, or an unfinished attempt to change it in some ways. I'm having a hard time imagining Apple just willy nilly nuking a fairly prominent feature many people use. Including myself, by the way.
You seem particularly willing to ignore the facts in order to paint Apple's actions in a good light.
Apple releases developer notes containing changes included in its betas. Such a change should obviously have appeared right away when iOS 17.4 beta 1 was released. It did not.
After two weeks of backlash, Apple did confirm it was removing the feature in a public statement. They just did not want to announce it publicly before.
After two other weeks of bigger backlash and the start of an EU investigation, they publicly announced they would not remove the feature after all.
They 100% intended to remove the feature, and 100% backed down.
Definitely just Apple trying to save face. Without the threat of fines and lengthy legal proceedings Apple would not have cared about "epic's commitment to follow the rules"
Difficult to imagine what Apple were thinking in the first place. Did they actually think there was a chance the EU would let this slide? Best I can tell, all they've achieved is bringing even greater scrutiny on themselves.
When reason fails to explain people's actions, it gives you a measure of the strength of their ideology on something. In this case, you can see how deeply they believe in the concept of complete authoritarian control of their ecosystem. Enough that logic and practical outcomes barely matter in comparison.
That ideology hasn't stopped them from becoming the most valuable company in the world, so I wouldn't disregard it from the point of view of practical outcomes.
I think they are struggling to adapt to a new situation that has resulted from their own success.
An ideology that helps you build and grow a new platform may not be equally suitable for running a dominant platform on which significant parts of the world economy depend.
Well... all corporations [0] are modelled after authoritarian states. The only model that seems to work is a single person with dictatorial power and a tree shaped hierarchy. Pretty much everyone does that, and the exceptions prove the rule. It isn't weird that they have authoritarian views of how their assets should be managed.
Hold in mind that everything involves trade offs. Authoritarianism is really good at monomaniacal focus on something that the dictator thinks is important, they just tend to fail at all the other stuff. And it is fine - indeed, remarkably effective - as long as people can leave when the focus isn't benefiting them.
Democracy sucks at pretty much everything except being flexible in the face of change and empowering voters. You do not want your food supply being run according to democratic principles, you want it to work.
Authoritarian states are a very ineffective model. A leader can lead their small band of merry man to rob the highway alright. But it doesn't scale up to larger groups of people.
If you talk to the CEOs of large companies or miltary leaders, you find that they are unable to exert effective control of their organisations. The organisation will do whatever it wants to do. The leader can make their command but at every level through the organisation that command will be slightly subverted. The more layers, the less of that command will get through.
Since it's in the news, take for example Putin and Russia, Putin thought he had tank battalions that his lower downs had sold for parts decades ago. Based on the information in front of him, he should have taken Ukraine in several days regardless of resistance by the locals.
And whilst you might think it's impressive that he cut the budget in US congress to Ukraine, back-handed deals to send old Soviet equipment from 3rd party countries to Ukraine were made and now they are exhausted London is loaning Ukraine, Russia's money.
Putin's authoritarian Russia might be able to cut off the head of democracy but he's up against a five headed hydra. Democracy is a lot more scary than Authoritarism from a military perspective.
"You do not want your food supply being run according to democratic principles, you want it to work."
This is something that people don't really get, what's important is that the people delivering the food get the sack if they failed to do it. As long as that happens it's okay.
That's the reason why socialist and overly authoritarian countries have supply problems, they don't have an effective mechanism to replace failing organisations. Venezuela isn't able to extract Oil because the Oil dereks are run by the local dictator's family members.
> Democracy is a lot more scary than Authoritarism from a military perspective.
Yes. But note that armies are a hierarchy with little flexibility once orders start coming down. When democracies want to achieve outcomes they set up (subordinate) dictatorships. The army does not stop to vote in the middle of a war. Indeed, sticking to the Ukraine example, they suspended elections as I assume is usual in war.
Democracy is a better model of governance because the military can focus on winning wars. In a dictatorship, the military has to focus on keeping the dictator in power - otherwise the dictator will get rolled. Since authoritarianism can only do one thing at once, generally they have a weak military at the expense of stability.
Democracy without what you term 'subordinate-dictatorship' would just be anarchy. Democracy is the _collective_ will of the people, it necessarily includes compulsion to do things one doesn't precisely align with which you seem to consider as "dictatorship". But, when the demos compells you to obey orders, that's still democracy.
There is a hierarchy and a single person at the peak of it who has ultimate executive power (a Chief Executive Officer, if you will) then it'll perform roughly the same as as authoritarian system except in some highly unusual circumstances. A military coup by the army would play out differently for example, but day-to-day operation would be largely the same. And most of the performance differences between democracies and non-democracies come down to democracies having more freedom not to worry as much about generals getting too powerful.
It doesn't matter where the power officially stems from, the decision making bandwidth and incentive structures govern results - and for companies that is a clear authoritarian model.
There can be, but it's not necessary in a democracy and you can design a democracy in which any action is subordinate to the demos should they choose to operate against it.
> Since authoritarianism can only do one thing at once, generally they have a weak military at the expense of stability.
I wouldn't say Nazi Germany had a weak military. They had problems with too many tank models (to appease Hitler?) but they only begain losing the war when everyone else that was against them got their act together. And of course, invading Russia. That one was stupid.
Difficult to imagine what "companies" are thinking. I was working as an executive for subsidiary of eBay Inc. but would never imagine something like this happenening:
Why wouldn't you think the EU would let that slide? Until recently all they've done is fine these companies amounts of money that are nice for headlines but not really that painful. Regulators with teeth is - new for apple
Just because a government organization wants to push some bad laws, it doesn't mean they can't also do good, and enact useful policies that are actually good for people.
My suggestion would give consumers an additional choice. Sounds like that is something you are against? I thought that this was what this was all about.
As long as consumers can choose to download WhatsApp from the App Store and are then not forced to use some tracking Meta store.
Dma is mostly about choice for a couple of developers. Not for users. No way will Epic publish games on their own and Apples store, they did not do it with the Epic Store either. Consumers did not have a choice where to buy when Epic bought exclusive access.
Afaik on Android exactly this happens, consumers can download Whatsapp from google play or if they want, they may sideload it.
Epic was not allowed to publish games on app store after avoiding 30% tax, so consumers were not able to install it from app store anyway so again, with this law, consumers in eu that may want to sideload instead of doing nothing at all, will be able to
So just as I said, consumer takes decisions what apps to install and how to install them instead of apple. If you don't want to use sideloading - don't use it
Apple really didn’t make this easy for themselves.
In addition to all the legal stuff, they literally gave “the finger” to every EU developer and customer of theirs.
I think this was all a distraction to give regulators some way to pretend they are doing something while retaining their ridiculous pricing structure and avoiding discussion on that.
I don't think they can possibly hope for that distraction to work. They know they will be under massive pressure to change this absurd pricing structure.
I think their strategy is to move the point of reference for future negotiations to an extreme end of the spectrum of what could still be considered to comply with the letter of the law.
Quality of life, work-life balance, good schools, good transport, lots of consumer protections, human rights & rights for minorities, 70 years of peace.
Economic growth isn't great but could be a lot worse if I look at the rest of the world.
Energy transition for sure has some huge challenges but again, we're doing pretty great compared to other places in the world.
Housing is an issue, but where isn't housing an issue?
Yes? Housing is infinitely better than the US, job security can be better, work life balance is better, cities are nicer to look at, architecture is better, people are more active, fitter, have lives beyond work. The bread is better, so is the cheese. There is real food available. Public transport is plentiful. Society feels a bit less polarised.
The EU is infinitely better than living in the states. At least for this third world immigrant.
Interesting. I thought housing in the EU has been a challenge for generations with home ownership a difficult to impossible goal for most people, with this being the case across the region. In the US the housing affordability issue is in a few highly desirable urban areas, but not being generally case across the country.
I think the bread in the US, sans the supermarket stuff, is generally exceptional with bakeries throughout most cities that are top notch. Some of the best creameries in the world are in the US now. Beer is also generally more innovative and better. There is also a much broader food community in that I can eat food from every culture on earth with pretty high quality in every city. Europe tends to be much less diverse and less creative in its foods. However, yes, if you only eat fast food and shop at big box grocery stores (which also exist in Europe) staples are pretty low quality.
The US has a very strong and thriving food movement, and isn’t a strict monoculture by geography. There are layers upon layers of cultures intertwined throughout the country. Generically “American culture” is essentially a marketing regime for large companies selling their stuff. But the reality of America is much more complex than that, and that’s accelerated since the 1950’s, and was completely broken down in the 1990’s.
Most of the polarization stems from that destruction of the American monoculture belief system and a reaction against that. It’s the last gasp of people who see a way of thinking falling apart. But what comes out of that cultural change is excellent bread, cheese, beer, etc.
" But the reality of America is much more complex than that, and that’s accelerated since the 1950’s, and was completely broken down in the 1990’s. " You complain a lack of seing the complexity of American food but instead you have a simple view of the European cultures. Have you been ever in any European country and when? I have the feeling you havent been.
I’ve traveled through most of Europe and the UK for pleasure but also regularly visit Germany, Italy, France, Ireland, Scotland, England, and Switzerland for work.
If I go to your average Italian city I simply won’t find good Thai food. I’ll get a lot of great Italian food for sure. But no Malay, no Nepalese, no afghan, no Peruvian, etc. I’m sure you’ll find counter examples, but the US genuinely is a melting pot with well established ethnic subcultures of all cultures on earth and the general society is pretty open. There’s no French nationalism etc. The thing is there’s no established cultural monoculture like you find in most of the world - what people mistake for a lack of culture in America is that it’s a palimpsest of hundreds of cultures, and they all bring their foods to the American table.
This isn’t a knock on the modern multiculturalism in Europe, it’s more a statement that the established historic cultures in Europe squeeze out the diversity more than in the US with its lack of established historic culture that has almost entirely evaporated in the last 80 years.
I can’t say I agree with this assessment. There’s good Thai food in NYC, but probably less so in rural New York. In the same way, there’s amazing Thai food in Berlin, but probably not in rural Bavaria.
Also, in your average Italian city, the average meal will still be healthier than the average American meal. The idea of food deserts is what doesn’t exist in Europe, at least not Western Europe. The local mom and pop shops still have veggies and fruits, and I was amazed to find none within biking distance when I was in the US.
I don’t want to have to need to shop at Trader Joes, Whole Foods, or live in a posh city to avoid having to eat over-processed food and be constipated all of the time.
Even my city in germany that has ~25k inhabitans has: italian, greek, turkish, chinese, and I think thai as well. And that is just off the top of my head all within a ~5min walking distance.
One thing to bear in mind; if you’re a tourist in a place, you tend to be exposed to the touristy stuff. Italy actually is an example where getting good non-Italian food may be difficult even in many large cities (this broadly makes sense; it has the oldest population in Europe and one of the lowest immigration rates), but it’s a bit of an outlier there; most large European cities will do better.
> I thought housing in the EU has been a challenge for generations with home ownership a difficult to impossible goal for most people, with this being the case across the region.
Who told you that? I mean, it’s certainly the case in some places (particularly in large affluent cities), but, much like in the US, it’s variable. If you take EU countries and the US and rank by home ownership percentage, the US is on the low end (even Ireland, with its long-running nationwide housing crisis, beats the US here). Notably _Germany_ is much lower (65% of US homes are owner occupied, 50% of German homes), but Germany’s an outlier in Europe on this; to a large extent it’s driven by below-cost social housing.
As someone who recently bought a house in the EU, IMO the best place to make money is the US. But, the best place to spend it is the EU. Much like doing the location/CoL arbitrage in the US, it's even better if you can get higher end US salaries and do a quality of life arbitrage to the EU.
The EU is on a roll politically, it's much more agile and expertise-focused than most governments. Also he ceiling is a lot higher than in the US given that half of the EU is underdeveloped. Look at Estonia's potential for example, Bolt is the fastest growing transportation company globally.
There is, it's called workforce. Incase you need an example, TSMC recently pushed back its fab plans in the US by atleast a year because they couldn't find enough specialists.
Economic growth can come from productivity gains without any material change in workforce.
TSMC's delays have to do with not offering enough pay not a lack of people capable of installing wafer fab tools or building electrical or mechanical systems for fabs.
If you can't have successful tech giants, you can have principles. If Apple/Meta/Alphabet were European companies the EU regulators would have absolutely no scruples about these things.
Every country talks 'free trade!' out of one side of their mouth, and implements protectionism via various concerns about health/safety/fairness out of the other when it's expedient. The US isn't any different, it's just not tech companies we're worried about (except some clock app that the Gen Z kids are obsessed with).
I really don't think the oil and railroad monopolies were broken up for the benefit of consumers, or due to some high-minded principles. They were broken up at the behest of other domestic industries which they were strangling, and those industries had the political clout to take on the monopolies. Arguably the same thing happened with the AT&T monopoly.
The US came very close to passing similar legislation recently and it still could. This bill had bipartisan support. Apple was able to kill it using relationships with leadership, but the votes were there. My organization Fight for the Future worked on lobbying for this, and while it's super difficult to pass legislation over big company opposition, it's not impossible. We can have similar rules in the US if we keep pushing.
Yeah, the fact that Epic is the one makes it really hard to care. They really need a better standard bearer. It's kind of like watching ManU play Chelsea. I'd be really happy if both teams could lose.
Every company benefits from not being beholden to the App Store and Apple's sales tax. I couldn't care less that Epic is not a perfect messenger, as long as Apple gets the message.
You call it a sales tax which is not the correct term, so I have an issue seeing your side of it. I see it as someone selling a product in someone else's store. Normal people would call that retail/wholesale pricing in ways that's actually more beneficial to the seller than the retailer in the App Store. Negotiate a 30% rate in negotiating with WalMart/Target/BestBuy, and I'll call you the best negotiator to ever walk the planet.
Are you under the impression that lootboxes aren't allowed on the official App Store? Because they absolutely are, I would wager that a significant chunk of Apples store revenue comes from games with faux-gambling mechanics. Genshin Impact alone has made billions of dollars on mobile through gacha monetization and Apple has no objections to that strategy as long as they get their cut.
Oh wait, half a billion dollars isn't a slap on the wrist is it?
Apple at least has the decency to tell you up front and clearly how they are going to stick it to you. Epic stabs you in the back while picking your pocket and then locks you out, the FTC fines reflect how egregious their actions were.
Different people have different things they are worried about. I’m personally concerned about Chrome’s dominance and I think iOS not allowing alternative browsers is the only thing holding back Chromium’s total victory.
I know some here would welcome a single browser target, but I personally think it concentrates too much power with Google.
Privacy is a related concern. I think it’s only going to take one killer app to really launch an alternative App Store. A few years ago when Fortnite was super popular, Fortnite fans would have installed an Epic store in a heart beat if it meant they could play Fortnite.
Once an alternative App Store has significant power, I think they are going to be able to start eroding some of the iOS privacy guarantees. That will be done in the name of consumer interest - things are cheaper here because we can give you better, targeted ads! - but in the long run I don’t think teenagers getting some special Fortnite loot is in their best interests if it means tighter surveillance.
I could also see school districts and/or testing organizations require installations of super invasive anti-cheating apps. There have already been cases of school districts getting caught spying on kids with school issued laptop webcams.
In the end, Apple’s stubbornness and greed brought this on. If they would have been more reasonable, I think both the company and their users would be a lot better off.
Thank You for not regurgitating the same "mwahh all apps will be on 3rd party app stores!! terrible!!" argument I keep seeing. These are some solid points.
I believe that overall the DMA is a good thing, there are some things I would change, but this gives me new perspective on the matter. Cheers.
Epic and Apple famously had a close relationship. A few years back, Epic was onstage at every Apple keynote. They were showing off games on iOS on macOS, talking about API development. I understand why Tim Sweeney felt like they were getting ripped off, but it seemed like they had a strong relationship.
I’m so tired of this Apple tax, I think nobody would be this annoyed if Apple were saying 10% or something around that. 30% is more than most companies pay in tax on profits and this is a tax on revenue. I don’t think abusing your market position like some kind of protection racket should be allowed and if you don’t like it we’ll delete your App is quite frankly just as bad as the mafia smashing in shop windows. I doubt anyone will stop them but we can hope…
If only it was just about the money. The review process itself is beyond ridiculous sometimes, and sometimes has you remove things from your apps that you want and your users want, but Apple doesn't like.
Europe is the home of ARM, the core technology licensed in Apple silicon for what, 15 years now? STMicroelectronics too, who is just as important in the production of the iPhone as Texas Instruments.
More logically, the United States is reluctant to regulate phone shipments because Apple and Google constitute the strongest surveillance network ever exported internationally. Europe stands to lose nothing if Epic or Spotify go bankrupt, the 'muh protectionism' argument only makes sense from the perspective of companies that actually matter. So obviously there has to be something bigger at play, the Commission wouldn't be listening to scoundrels and nobodies unless they said something that made sense.
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30% isn't some outlier share though? It also has been that way since the beginning, so it's not like they achieved their market position and then jacked up the prices; it's been this way the whole time - and, in fact, they've added programs where smaller businesses only pay a 15% commission..
Not an outlier and is pretty standard. When it was originally announced it was one of the best deals out there for developers writing software for phones. The WWDC audience cheered at getting 70%.
Wasn't the market for mobile app small at the time. Almost everyone was focused on desktop and web applications. If you're looking to make millions, even preferential deals don't look like a good deal.
Doesn't matter. Why does the developer of the operating system get to take anything from a sale between an app developer and the owner of the actual cellphone? It is not Apples phone anymore after they sell it to a customer. Imagine if your car manufacturer wanted 30% of revenue from the shops you drive your car to.
Replace "developer of the operating system" with "curator of the ecosystem of highly affluent, paying customers" and you'll start to understand why Apple thinks they should have a cut. They see themselves as the headhunter, finding paying customers for the developer.
This is an extremely long tail problem. When you count the absolute numbers on the revenue, it's much larger. Perhaps the absolute majority of the app store revenue would be subject to the 30% tax. Money matters, not the number of apps.
Apple’s behavior largely makes sense given what a huge share of their profits their racketeering of customer access earns them. If you ever wanted to see regulation pains as the cost of doing business, this is it.
But banning epic was just pathetic baby behavior.
I hope epic launches the epic game store for iOS and its dogshit but cheaper and the gacha gravy boats all jump ship
Because everyone else basically said "the new conditions are bad, I won't risk my business", but in the particular case of Epic they're banned from Apple's walled garden, so even the terrible terms are better than nothing.
They aren't banned from the App Store. The agreement that Epic's Swedish subsidiary is the standard developer agreement, and they can publish whatever they like in the App Store as long as they follow Apple's guidelines.
Apple has said as much for the main developer account in the past.
It is highly unlikely Epic would publish anything in the App Store, however, even ignoring the bad blood.
Part of operating an App Marketplace is that you are agreeing to the EU rules which include a core technology fee. So even an app with no in-app purchasing on the Apple App Store would cost them a substantial amount to publish.
Remember that the EU Commission has not said a word about the new fee that Apple added, but that fee looks against the spirit of the DMA, so it is likely that Apple will be forced to give up that fee considering they already charge an annual membership for the developer account.
Apple overplayed their anti-competitive card, so now they'll be permanently scrutinized.
652 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadLike, there's no strategy at all here? Just keep swinging and hope you land a blow that breaks through the armor? This is how my 15 year old plays VR games.
Picking these petty fights or whining about getting fined is not helpful, certainly not to Apple and their shareholders. It's hard not to conclude that Apple leadership is making stupid emotional decisions rather than rational ones, which is especially dumb when you're running a trillion dollar company.
Since, ultimately, his duty as a CEO is to prioritize the financial wealth of shareholders. If he just complied with the EU then he'd be voted out by the board by the end of the week.
Is he going overboard? I think so. But I've also never owned a $2T+ company with investors and an entire government breathing down my neck.
Most companies like Facebook and Microsoft quietly comply with the rules as best they can with as little fanfare as possible. Maybe after paying a fine or two. As far as I know, there hasn't been any oustings because of that.
Microsoft was acting like this in the 90s. I think history is just repeating itself with Apple.
So... the difference was Microsoft was winning those fights because their enemy was other products in the market. They'd tell Dell not to ship Netscape, and Dell would yank the product. They'd clone java, and websites would code to that to get IE compliance. They'd push ActiveX and bribe web properties to implement it, and they would. This wasn't fair, but it was at least in some sense "competition". (I mean, eventually MS would go on to lose control of all those levers, but over decades of timescale and generally due to market motion.)
Apple here is just flailing. It's a regulatory action, not a competitor. There's no feasible path to beating or evading EU law. Surely they know that, right?
Google just needs to allow for the selection of a default browser, provide links in Google search to competing sites (which Google will still make money off of with their ad delivery network anyway), opt-out option for sharing data between YT, Search, Maps, etc. As well as allow outside payment processors for apps.
For Microsoft and Google, none of these changes are affecting their cash cow. Cloud computing for MS, and ads for Google.
These DMA changes are affecting Apple's cash cow, the iPhone. and their second largest cash cow, Services and IAP. Apple has a LOT more on the line with these DMA changes than MS or Google do.
None of the large tech companies lack of embarrassment.
I feel like the whole fiduciary responsibility bit is always the foundation of terrible arguments. As if every individual choice that earns a dollar is therefore forced.
Earning multiple billion dollar fines is not serving shareholders. Sabotaging the future is not serving shareholders. Destroying goodwill is not serving shareholders.
Apple's various tantrums and desperate clutching onto their market hasn't remotely been beneficial for the company, and I'd argue it is a big reason the company has started plateauing. Like how Valve went from being a game maker to being a purveyor of gambling crates and keys, Apple is desperately pimping for every bit of rent-seeking and service fees.
> Earning multiple billion-dollar fines is not serving shareholders.
Correct, and until Apple is threatened with fines, I believe they'll continue doing this until it no longer serves them.
I don't find the tantrums to be the cause of the plateauing, I think they're a response to it. The iPhone is their #1 money-maker (by a massive margin at that), and the smartphone market as a whole has been plateauing. That's why we've seen a shift over the years towards services, which is their #2 money-maker now. When the DMA strongly affects both of these revenue streams, tantrums will ensue.
I'm not agreeing that what they're doing is correct, and I think it's shitty for a company that I consider the reason I got into the dev/design space to begin with to start acting like this. But I do see some business logic behind why they're doing what they're doing, even when it goes against what I know is correct.
Commission fines Apple over €1.8 billion over abusive App store rules for music streaming providers.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
Maybe tripping up the same entity that's already on to you with other fines for similar behavior is not that smart.
Yes, typically democratically elected governments include judges, juries, and executioners. They'd be pretty ineffectual otherwise.
> The termination of Epic Games Sweden AB’s Apple developer account was communicated in a letter from Mark Perry, a lawyer representing Apple, to Epic’s lawyers:
> Mr. Sweeney’s response to that request was wholly insufficient and not credible. It boiled down to an unsupported “trust us.” History shows, however, that Epic is verifiably untrustworthy, hence the request for meaningful commitments. And the minimal assurances in Mr. Sweeney’s curt response were swiftly undercut by a litany of public attacks on Apple’s policies, compliance plan, and business model. As just one example: https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1762243725533532587?s=20.
Maybe Tim sent more than a two sentence reply to Phil to get it straightened out. It's anyone's guess at this point.
—
[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2024/03/apple_epic_developer_acco...
The Digital Markets Act is all about profit-motivated businesses. It regulates markets, not charities. It's not anti-profit at all, just pro-competition, and Apple was attempting to stifle competition.
The entire point of DMA is to make sure platforms can’t use lock in to prevent others from joining the market for digital goods and services.
What terrifies Apple isn’t Fortnite, it’s that Epic will make a *better* AppStore.
That being said: it's probably a good thing it was Epic that Apple went after; Apple would probably have gotten away with going after a smaller company.
What's to prevent them from changing their mind and blocking Epic again? What if Tim Sweeney says something else to hurt Apple's feelings in the future? Apple has too much free rein over removing access to this market, and while it may be a market that Apple has made, the EU is clearly requiring Apple to open up the market for others with the only restrictions being those where the app store or the apps themselves are damaging to consumers in the marketplace.
They almost certainly are, which is why the reasoning of EU’s predictable involvement was what triggered Apple’s reinstatement of Epic’s account seems dubious to me.
Also I should point out that there's a significant difference between breaking a contract mutually agreed upon and negotiated by two companies, versus breaking a ToS that's forced upon you. Epic's "rule breaking" was essentially a legal strategy to force Apple to legally justify their control. It wasn't some random hooliganism.
Remember the classic and often seen disclaimer: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
>versus breaking a ToS that's forced upon you.
Epic wasn't forced to sign anything.
Funny, because part of what makes the free parts of the world "free" is competition, which is exactly what Apple is trying to stifle.
Also it's funny you cite that disclaimer about right of refusal, because in fact, there are plenty of discrimination laws that address just that and in general there are reasons you can and can't refuse service, legally speaking.
> Epic wasn't forced to sign anything.
Sure, plenty of businesses just love to ignore >50% of the market. I'm sure their investors would completely understand.
You're the one that cited right of refusal *shrug*
> 2. Epic violated mutually agreed upon terms in cases prior, which Apple can rightfully cite in future references.
"Mutually agreed upon" is a hilarious way of putting it. Epic rebelled against a bad system. More importantly, they won. The law is more important now than Apple's rules, and the fact that Apple backed down shows that they know that.
> 3. Apple customers are free to choose Android or Windows or any other platform with Epic software. Competition, baby!
As an Apple customer, this pisses me off. I have no desire to switch but I also have no desire for Apple to act in this way. Epic's win is good for customers, only Apple fanboys or investors are upset by this.
> 4. If you want to do business with someone, you and them both agree to and abide by terms set forth. If you don't like the terms, you renegotiate and if that doesn't pan out you terminate the agreement according to terms therein or otherwise as amicably as possible and go on your way.
They did renegotiate... through the courts. There are reasons we have antitrust laws and anti-monopoly laws. You cant have any sort of reasonable negotiation when one side is a 900 pound gorilla. Regulation matters when it comes to market access
> 5. Bluntly speaking, Epic might need Apple but Apple doesn't need Epic.
So your point is that Apple is a mega-giant that doesn't feel harm from banning a smaller competitor? You're basically making my point for me.
Well no. Instead of that, if the other party is required by law to do business with you, then you can use government force to make them do so.
And if Apple disagrees, then they are perfectly within their right to shutdown their EU operations and lose tens of billions of dollars I guess.
But the rest of us are perfectly willing to use democratically enacted laws, as they are intended.
> but Apple doesn't need Epic
They need the EU though. And if they don't comply with the law then they will be fined many billions of dollars, or be shut down entirely in the EU.
This would be true, if Apple hadn't positioned themselves as gatekeeper to running software on a significant portion of the world's personal computers. If Apple wants full say over who they do business with all it has to do is allow its users to install software distributed by parties they do not do business with.
While Mr Perry prefers to parry words before a material blow lands, Mr Cook naturally avoids cooking an antitrust case.
Vision Pro is probably a gimmick along with the whole VR world right now, which will change soon too but overall I don't see anything exciting about apple.
Their pricing is infuriating and so are their decisions (laptop 8gb ram in 2024???)
To me it looks like they got stuck in the "this is what worked for us, so let's only do this" mentality and take no risks.
They stand on the shoulders of giants and most importantly on their cultural presence...
Maybe they’ll manage to get LLMs running well locally with the new low-bit developments? Not my area. But for training/learning it seems like Apple is DOA. They have the same problem as AMD, no one is doing research with their hardware or software.
Intentionally shipping low RAM/unified memory quantities seems short sighted too. Maybe with a 16GB baseline they could do something special with local LLMs.
It’s totally this time I promise, just like, one more ~~lane~~ model.
I’m sure they do care. I wouldn’t be surprised if they land significant support for on-app processing of models, they’ve already got the chip, dropping in local models is a sensible next step, and if close to zero effort for them.
> LLMs are going to have some general applications that users are going to want, and will become the norm
I have yet to see anyone, in my personal or professional circles, use any LLM:
- for more than a week
- for anything more than cutesy trivial things.
I’m sure there’s people around stapling models into their toaster, but this is so far from the normal.
They've done an okay job of that so far, but their flagship library is diverging pretty far from industry demand. At best, CoreML is a slightly funkier Tensorflow - at worst, it's a single-platform model cemetery. No matter what road they take, they have to keep investing in upstream support if they want Nvidia to feel the heat. Otherwise, it's CUDA vs CoreML which is an unwinnable fight when you're selling to datacenter customers.
I think it's possible for Apple to make everyone happy here by reducing hostilities and dedicating good work where it matters. Generally though, it feels like they're wasting resources trying to compete with Nvidia and retread the Open Source work of 3 different companies.
didn't Apple pretty much throw in the towel in this market simply by choice of form factor for their computers? The sheer desperation of their users wanting a device in this space is shown in the "creative" ways to mount their offerings in a rack.
all of the user friendly things they've done by shrinking the footprint, making them silent, etc are all things a data center does not care about. make it loud with fans to keep things cool so they can run at full load 24/7 without fear of melting down.
so from that lead alone, we can make the next assumption in that Apple doesn't care about vs CUDA. as long as they can show a chart in an over produced hype video for a new hardware announcement that has "arrows go up" as a theme, that is ALL they care about.
Users, developers, and probably Apple too would benefit from just using the prior art. I'd go as far as to argue Apple can't thread the AI needle without embracing community contributions. The field simply moves too fast to ship "AI Siri" and call it a day.
> The sheer desperation of their users wanting a device in this space is shown in the "creative" ways to mount their offerings in a rack.
Well you and I both know that nobody is doing that to beat AWS on hosting costs. It's a novelty, and the utility beyond that is restricted to the few processes that require MacOS in some arbitrary way. If we're being honest with ourselves, any muppet with a power drill and enough 1U rails can rackmount a Mac Mini.
If it makes their camera "smarter", it's a win. If they can make Siri do something more than "start a timer", then it's a win. If they can have images translate text more accurately, it's a win. There's a lot of things that an on device AI could help users without having to do all of the power hungry creation of a model or the fine tuning. They can do that in the mothership, and just push models on their device.
Not everyone needs to do AI the way you are trying to do it
Any of the aforementioned libraries could make their camera smarter or improve Siri/OCR marginally. The fact that Apple wasted their time reinventing the wheel is what bothers me, they're making a mistake by assuming that their internal library will inherently appeal to developers and compete with the SOTA.
The reason why I criticize them is because I legitimately believe Apple is one of the few companies capable of shipping hardware that competes with Nvidia. Apple is their only competitor at TSMC, it's entirely a battle of engineering wits between the two of them right now. Apple is going nowhere fast with CoreML and Accelerate framework, but they could absolutely cut Nvidia off at the pass by investing in the unified infrastructure that Intel and AMD refuse to. It also wouldn't harm the customer experience, leverages third-party contributions to advance their progress, and frees up resources to work on more important things. Just sayin'.
And the ARM changeover in the laptops has been so seamless, people seem to ignore the huge risks with switching architectures. And now everyone is chasing them for the same power/battery life.
They've had some missteps, but we need a few more years to really know if they have been left behind. Apple was never one to be first to do something.
After a life on windows and some periods on linux, apple managed to refine their os and hardware to the point where I can say, it doesn’t get in the way and it “just works”, which, I think, is what most professionals want.
The App Store monopoly generates billions in ad revenue from app vendors advertising their apps on search results. That will take a huge hit if there's an alternate app store they can potentially pay a lot less to gain exposure.
Blocking Fortnite updates on iOS devices was an inconvenience for users compared to terminating the use of an entire gaming marketplace due to the next round of vigilante contract violation by Epic.
Which probably boils down to one overzealous middle/higher manager trying too hard to be a good boi for superiors to get extra bonus... I don't think it panned as expected. Otherwise apple corporate culture is quite rotten.
Especially when you add the failed PWA move before, they're starting to look pretty bad.
Now not paying an equal share of tax, on the other hand, is criticism I can join in on.
What's actually missing that's stopping this from working?
Proper support on all platforms. No point working on PWAs that have janky tooling (reason: see previous sentence) when they're only going to work decently on Android devices anyway.
You also didn’t answer what is missing. What is missing? What’s this insurmountable problem that’s solved everywhere else? Why is janky tooling attributable to Apple?
PWAs are the perfect scapegoat of infinite nebulous whining. The definition of a progressive web app might as well be "whatever Chrome has but Safari doesn't, no matter what year it is or how those features change, and no matter how terrible of an idea they might be even on Chrome".
If you need it spelled out for you:
* WebUSB
* WebBLE
* WebSerial
* WebGL
* Many more standards Apple refuses to implement because it would let developers break free of their walled garden
Without being able to target apple devices why would I, or anyone, bother using these technologies and invest in their tooling? Just make a native android app with quality tooling that's been around for a decade and be done with it.
And.... even if you wanted to build a serial-port enabled "Works only in Chrome" PWA today (lol, we both know you're not) there's no tooling jankiness stopping you from doing so, checking for `if ("serial" in navigator) { ... }` requires no tooling at all it's just plain javascript, you'd just choose to show an error message for browsers like Safari and Firefox that don't support it.
I'm not convinced you're even arguing in good faith here. Well, I never was because PWA whiners never are, but you've proven you're not.
I get people are use to free, but plenty of companies license software for royalties that does a lot less.
That's what the $99/year fee is for. Apple set that price themselves. It can also be argued that some of the cost of the SDKs is included into the price of the Mac that any iOS developer has to have.
> or OS
That's included into the price of every iPhone because you can't even buy an iPhone without an OS or install your own, like you can do with PCs.
The App store is a highly trusted place to download things on your phone, and that's a value that apple provides and that costs money to maintain. Pretending that it's as isolated as you pretend feels very disingenuous.
If the app store is truly as immensely useful as Apple wants everyone to believe, why not enable full-on Android-style sideloading on iOS and let the app store compete with that on its own merits? Surely everyone would still prefer it if it's so great?
The interests of their shareholders are literally the interests of their customers.
Apple makes incredible products, that billions of people pay significant money for, with many competitors that are much cheaper. Their shareholders reap the rewards of this.
If Apple customers hated Apple, they would not be Apple customers, and Apple would not be one of the most valuable businesses in human history.
There would be no need hide information from customers if that was true. Their censorship, the fact that Apple desperately wants to hide what they are doing, is very revealing and incriminating.
And they do that across _all_ sectors of industry, you only noticed the tech one because it's in the news you pay attention to, but everything from farming to textiles to tech to pharmaceuticals are heavily regulated so that the people that live in the EU can enjoy a reasonable standard of living.
But in this case benefiting the general public is easy because it does not hit a European company ( production in China, development in America) that is working hard to extract money which it sends abroad while avoiding paying taxes here (probably legally).
A good opportunity to reign Apple and friends in and score some "greater good" points in particular since the US government is also sceptical and mostly concerned with internal affairs at the moment.
Where democracy decides it ends.
Edit: Misread the comment, sorry.
All he said is that it's the democratically elected officals that decide what laws companies have to obey. Just as they decide everything else about what what laws people have to obey.
You're right! I misread.
>Apparently the media zeitgeist is so strong with this now that even just saying "Democracy" triggers the thought.
Or I just misread the comment.
One can argue whether this specific legislation is wise, but legally i don't think there's any limit to what the EU can mandate for goods sold in their market.
It's asinine that I, as a consumer, can pay over $1000 for a device and not be able to choose which software I can run on it because the developer of that device locks out access. It's even worse that the company I bought it from can arbitrarily disable the device, features, and services that I have paid for, and I have little to no recourse.
Setting standards is one of the oldest forms of regulation, ever since weights and measures were standardized to ensure people could trade more easily, ensuring that when you bought a pound of flour from one vendor it would be the same pound as the vendor across the street.
They won't because they know Apple exiting would simply hand the market to those that can bear the harsh yoke of consumer regulation.
What...by being successful?
They have less than 25% smartphone marketshare. What monopoly do they have?
That's why the regulation targets "gatekeepers" with revenue in the billions and at least 45Million European users.
The EU decided that this is large enough to be limited in what they can do.
Congrats, you won, now let somebody else play the game and become a boring public utility. And by the way, your research lab is now a public university. And the taxes is what government does, not you.
Because the role of the government (in theory) is to use these taxes for public utility services and projects. Companies only care about their owners and shareholders, a very small subset of the population. If you're not contributing to society, but just profiteering, you should retire. Especially if your position lead you to have a say to what succeed or not in the economy.
Curious, how would you split them up? A lot of their stuff is very intertwined, I guess Beats, Shazam are easy to split into their own, but the rest?
They can still be quite integrated, they just have to a allow a different distribution company compete without using the phone company's monopoly as a leverage against them and not use distribution company as a leverage to compete with other software developers i.e. pay the same 30% fee, bid for promotion in the store and use fair ranking in the search.
It's not the first time a huge corp gets split up once they reach end game and can't innovate in their own field anymore.
Maybe that's just me though. ;)
On top of that, their record for Apple:EU battles is what? N:0?
Edit: Of course your anti-Apple bias shows and you downvote anything going against the circle jerk
I'm pretty sure a middle-schooler could understand the EU Commission's reasoning here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/image/conten...
You might disagree, but this is an Apple-specific behavior that does demonstrable harm to the market and consumers. Apple was flippant towards Dutch regulators when they were being investigated over this, and that negligence earned them scrutiny on a much larger stage. The further Apple doubles-down, the more legislative artillery the EU will dedicate to stopping them; this reversal on Epic's account is evidence that Apple doesn't see light at the end of their tunnel, they're not building a defensible case.
As an Apple customer myself, I'd be much happier if they spent that money researching a way to charge the Magic Trackpad over USB-C. This is precisely the behavior that makes me ashamed to use Apple hardware.
It's more like the EC told both sides to get some adults in the room and work it out. Since they clearly didn't force Apple to change any rules and Epic agreed to follow Apple's rules, I have no idea where all this chest-beating is coming from. Apple is still winning and the EC is still feckless.
So technically they "worked it out" but only after a "parent" threatened to send them to bed without dinner.
But I suspect it'll take them more time until it fully sinks and until they are done testing their new boundaries.
Well done.
The simplest explanation for what happened with Apple this past few weeks is that there's no master plan. The EU told them the rules, they didn't take them seriously, now they're realizing a bit late that they can't afford not to respect the rules and they're scrambling to figure out what that means.
So according to Apple [edit] one isn't allowed to say bad things about a company publicly or they are allowed to ban your account? Interesting view.
I don't really think that's according to DF, more so Apple.
That's the issue with all these providers. Every couple of weeks there's a story from someone whose Google account was suddenly closed with no way to access their emails or pictures again.
Once you buy a smartphone today you and everybody who wants to do further business with you are at the mercy of a monopolist. For Apple 100%, for Google only 98% because you could side-load. But not a secure and practical solution today.
Combined with the "must be very big" requirement it better fits what is going on in the tech world.
Yes, you have a choice once every couple of years while you might want to install an app several times a year. Free markets would also be the wrong word to describe the situation.
A customer is only looking for either iOS or Android apps, and isn't going to choose an Android app if they have an iPhone, or vice versa (IOW, iOS apps don't compete with Android apps).
Imagine only one company sold diesel fuel, and only one sold gasoline. Wouldn't you say they each had a monopoly?
Said another way, you might be right about US antitrust law, but when that law was written the technology didn't exist to create "vendor lock-in" on millions of products at once.
I am curious about the example though, from a legal perspective. Would the only seller of gasoline have a monopoly, even if other fuels were available, and the only barrier to using them was the switching cost of buying a new vehicle?
Edit: For what it's worth, wikipedia uses the word monopoly when "a single vendor controls the market for the method or technology being locked in to".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in
Why can I run code Apple loathes on my Mac ?
The DMA was always phrased from the wrong perspective (which is just classic EU, they literally cannot ever get regulation right). The correct phrasing is: once a computer operating system achieves a certain level of market adoption (say, 50M+ active installations), it is designated as a systemically critical operating system. Among other regulations, one thing systemically critical operating systems must allow is the independent and unrestricted installation and execution of applications from the internet.
Regulating the market (App Store) itself is just dumb. Apple should not be forced to have Epic Games as a customer. It destroys trust in the App Store's review process, and legitimately does from my perspective infringe on Apple's rights as a business to do business with partners as they please. There's a gulf of difference between "forcing the App Store to distribute some application" and "allowing that application to be freely distributed on the internet". Regulation should be specifically targeted toward the second situation; and leave the App Store alone.
It is Apple who decided that third-party software distributers must comply with certain restrictions, and must sign a contract with them.
And it was Apple which tried to prevent Epic from signing that contract, and who's now backtracking… before it's forced to do so by the EU.
Android allows the installation of alternative app stores but Google still retains large effective control over the app market.
I would argue that the EU recognised that and therefore regulated Operating systems and app stores because the former one isn't enough apparently.
If things continue along this trajectory we may see the utility argument at the store level and at the OS level.
Looking at how the electric power distribution industry is regulated it already works like this (at least here in Germany).
On the one hand grid operators are heavily regulated (as you say) and must allow companies without infrastructure to resell power to end customers.
On the other hand the actual owner of the last mile infrastructure is also forced to do business with all customers and has very little freedom to refuse(e.g. non-payment is a temporary valid reason).
We may very well see something similar in the software distribution market since it's becoming such an integral part of life.
Decades ago people were crying out against it, but nobody with power listened because they thought we just wanted to steal music[0]. Well, we did, but that didn't make us wrong. Now the world economy is owned by a handful of oligopolist-elected dictators who have maximally exploited the laws in question to make meaningful competition literally illegal.
No, seriously, try and ship a phone without big tech's blessing. It won't work. Hell, Amazon and Microsoft both tried and failed. Everyone only writes apps for Google Play and iOS, and any attempt to make them work elsewhere is a criminal felony.
[0] To be clear, their real concern was finding ways to legally bind China to pay us for "our IP" on pain of being shut out of world markets. Dictatorship is fractal.
It sounds like the problem isn't Google being able to refuse service, but instead that Google doing that has the power to kill your smaller company. No one company should be allowed to have the power to decide which companies live or die.
If I founded a company that specializes in manufacturing Pokemon toys under contract, and Nintendo (for whatever reason) pulls the contract, it's perfectly normal for the business to no longer be viable and to be liquidated.
If all restaurants are Taco Bell, is it reasonable to allow such bans by taco bell?
Apple is not a monopoly anywhere on the planet and has no such requirement.
But this is not about Apple's right as a company to refuse any business with Epic, they still have that right.
This is about Apple not complying with a law that targets them due to their anti-competitive behavior; a law that requires them to give the means to operate an App Store competitor to anyone who requests it.
Apple is the one who decided to require an Apple developer account in order to operate an App Store competitor, so they effectively gave up their right to refuse any business with Epic by adding this unnecessary requirement.
On the other hand, I'm definitely not saying this is okay or sane just because it's standard practice in the US. It's also how we got legalized segregation and we had to pass laws carving out exceptions to create protected classes such that you're not allowed to refuse service because a person is black, for instance. Just doing this splintered the country and created the modern GOP with its southern strategy.
So it's nice to see these large web companies having to respect the laws of other jurisdictions and not just the US with its hallowed history of property rights over all else, going all the way back to chattel slavery. If the EU can force saner norms on the web, I'm all for it.
There are enough really obvious counterexamples to that statement that I wonder why you'd write it.
In particular in this case, we have many pass example where even in the US, companies have be found to violate anti trusts law be either refusing or strongly conditioning doing business with a third-party.
I think you mean Black 3.0 (or the other versions from the same artist) which cannot be used by Anish Kapoor.
Worth nothing that the artist making that paint is british and not american.
No, according to Apple, they believed Epic was going to violate their developer agreement again, and when they asked Sweeney for a commitment he sent them a two sentence email. His public actions were only a modifier on top of his seeming lack of committal and previous history of being a bad actor on Apple’s platform.
Spotify says bad things about Apple all the time, but they've never been banned because they've never violated Apple's rules.
I personally think it’s silly to believe that Apple cares even a little about Epic’s criticism. They probably thought they had a legitimate case that would let them stomp out a potential big App Store competitor before it could get off the ground.
The fact that Apple is now regulated is definitely not a symptom of the illegality of their terms. Definitely not.
The European Economic Zone sets regulations around economic policy. Their creation of the DMA was that while the markets did not have monopolistic abuse, that there were areas that still did not have _enough_ competition.
Now I would argue the DMA is misguided, because they are basically trying to regulate in a counter to the network effect. The problem is (for example) that even with barriers lowered, an upstart messaging app cannot compete with WhatsApp because they still cannot grow by the network effects the way WhatsApp did, because WhatsApp already exists and is popular. An upstart will still have to already be on target to become larger than WhatsApp in order to supplant them.
Alternative Marketplaces have been possible on Android for years and really haven't succeeded except in markets where Google Play is unavailable. Why would developers put time and effort into being where nobody is? How does anything in the DMA change their minds - better transaction fees on no sales?
The DMA does give companies an opportunity to innovate, such as how MacPaw is going to have a SetApp Marketplace which is a subscription service for mostly utility apps (similar to Apple Arcade as a first-party marketplace for games). But I would argue there is no way SetApp will be as popular as the App Store - it is a business opportunity, not market competition. I would say this is akin to F-Droid - it is an alternative marketplace on Android, but not one that really competes with Play.
It is not an illegal contract. It is a contract that Epic _hopes_ is illegal.
I don't get to ignore my home mortgage payments without consequence even if I believe in my truest of heart that giving money to a bank is wrong. In this metaphor, Apple here is the bank saying that Epic has a habit of not paying back loans, and has publicly stated how they think the loan they are applying for is 'hot garbage'.
Apple (and Google) need to be saved from themselves sometimes.
Meanwhile the repeated reversals are making Apple look guilty and nefarious.
You don't need to do radical changes, just small actions like do not steal the tips students send to teachers.
Going full-goblin mode and demanding 30% of all the money that moves through a phone is what is destroying Apple.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/21/in-a-reversal-apple-is-now...
Smart people can make mischief visible or invisible without necessarily getting caught defecting or cooperating.
Oops did I draw that regulator’s attention to the room where we keep the bodies? Silly me.
I get the sentiment, but it's nice to finally have lawmakers and regulators standing for what's right - for once.
It’s funny how when Apple threatens a European company the EC can act within days, but when a German company is violating the GDPR, it takes 4 years for them to act. What a strange coincidence.
That's not up to you. What you get to decide is which stores you're willing to install apps from. If lots of people refuse to install apps from unrestrictive stores then developers who want to reach those users will have to meet the requirements of more restrictive stores.
You would only not have this choice if the app has a dominant market position, and then can force you to get it from a store you don't want to use. But then your problem isn't an overabundance of trust busting, it's an insufficiency of it.
The only solace is that you can modify Android to the point where there's almost no Google interference whatsoever. But of course some apps choose to rely on that (e.g. Banking).maybe one day Apple will begrudgingly get to that point.
Microsoft execs had their heads buried too deep in their own asses to be able to understand what was needed at the time.
They pushed a platform (Windows phone) that lacked interesting features out of the box, lacked cloud services integration to fill the gap left by the lacking base features, and required Windows as a development platform (and, iirc, C# as well?). It didn't even have any particular windows-ecosystem speciality: no special exchange integration, no special windows pc integration, nothing. Microsoft could have exploited the same reasons they exploited with Azure, Office365 and the general enterprise: microsoft phones should just integrates perfectly with other microsoft stuff. It could have been the no-brainer choice: we use ActiveDirectory and Office365 as a suite, we'll get a Windows Phones as everything just works immediately. No, nobody had thought of that.
The value proposition was just not there.
So basically another walled garden, but dumber. And the hardware didn't have anything special to make it "worth".
Seriously, the original iPhone had little going for it technically. No GPS, poor data bandwidth, no apps, and minimal ability to make phone calls. (It took the combined efforts of Apple and AT&T a couple generations before you could reliably place a call.)
But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth. It could zoom. And Steve Jobs marketed it well, whereas Steve Ballmer was terrible at marketing.
IMO the iPhone was considerably worse for business use than Windows Mobile, and neither one held a candle to the BlackBerry. But it didn’t matter.
you could have just shortened that to "Steve Ballmer was terrible" and been more accurate.
Basically an observation that consumers were interested in digital media players, which Apple had some expertise in building (iPods, for younger folks).
And that a usable browser was a killer feature (most of the web not having reactive mobile sites, and no apps, then).
And if you combined all of the above with a cell phone, customers would rather carry 1 device than the 3 it previously took.
And not coincidentally this is exactly how Jobs pitched the original iPhone unveil.
An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator, an iPod, a phone…
Things that apparently were not that important at launch. Apple did negotiate "unlimited" data plans with Cingular/AT&T.
> But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth
Better UI, better media playback, web browser that worked. Sounds like a classic example of Apple taking what is out there and simply doing it better.
IMO the real problem with Windows Phone was the complete failure to produce an actual platform. Windows Phone 7 was incompatible with Windows Mobile, and _Windows Phone 8 was largely incompatible with Windows Phone 7_! The whole thing was comically developer hostile.
(Second mistake; Windows Phone 7’s UI ran at 30fps, presumably in an attempt to save battery. This made it feel a lot worse than iOS and Android.)
Now, Apple is achieving per-eminance in the cross-device consumer OS market in the latop+tablet+smartphone space and Windows is slowly dying. Microsoft will just set to become yet another boring cloud services company.
Only in the US and global high-end market. This is an extremely profitable market to be leading and I'm not trying to minimize Apple's achievement, but globally relatively few people use their phones and tablets, and ever fewer use their traditional computers.
Apple has a sizable lead, but I think the "idea" of what a smartphone is has been locked in essentially in the mind of consumers and their technological lead will only last so long as time passes. They are Microsoft but of smartphones and 20 years younger than windows desktop PCs. They know this, which is why they constantly make new things and try to develop new products (vr headsets, etc).
MS beat Apple to market by a considerable margin. Windows Mobile substantially predates the iPhone, and it was actually usable. (I had one of their flagship devices.)
But MS’s OS concept was incoherent, their UI was laggy, their web browser was unbearably slow despite arguably superior hardware, their form factor was not snazzy. And, unlike Apple, they utterly failed at marketing to consumers.
Also, Apple out their foot down against carrier nonsense, so Apple users didn’t have to deal with $14.99/mo for Verizon Location or whatever they called it. (Although, to be fair, the original iPhone didn’t have GPS. Blackberry had far superior hardware at the time and really ought to have been able to compete, but they didn’t.)
By the time the App Store showed up, it was pretty clear that Apple was beating MS.
windows was well windows 8 and everyone hated it and everything about it. (and pre-windows phone 8 it was to fragmented with to many incompatible versions and little 3rd party support)
Palm/HP WebOS was the real mobile OS with the best chance to win but failed because well HP... need i say more.
Has trapped so many businesses.
Enterprise customers can afford to pay enough to support good profit margins...
... but there are many more regular consumers, and regular consumer demands tend to produce better solutions than baroque enterprise demands (usually company- or VP-specific).
Blackberry was doing great with keyboards and refused to sell more of. Windows Mobile had tons of muscles as market share they just trimmed off. Windows Phone had Marketplace trust issue that couldn't be solved. Nokia burned itself down before Google. Palm did most of it right, but couldn't be bothered with exclusivity reneg.
I can't say solving any one of them could have saved each of the brands, but they all had one giant elephant each that were enough to drag them down.
That was the attitude for a minute until the CEO got a cool iPhone.
Same with Macs. And jeans.
This is the main point, not the "also". Apple's revolution was actually getting it in the hands of real life consumers who paid for cell phone plans. The tech was already there with blackberry, but you had to have business to afford it. Yes, the original iPhone itself was a technical marvel, but it would have been a dead fish if it wasn't for the at& t deal that came out as part of it.
Apple didn't invent anything in the original iPhone, except the software. And the first version was really lacking and very buggy.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-rigged-first-iphon...
Other phones that predated the iPhone release had more capabilities and more software. There was nothing really "marvelous" about the original iPhone, it was many years behind Microsoft.
The HTC Wizard was a "technical marvel" in 2005. Apple was playing catch-up in 2007.
At the time I had an HTC TyTN 2 phone that did everything the iPhone could do and more, and had a removable battery, about the same size as the battery inside the iPhone 1. If you look at photos of the TyTN 2 battery, and the iPhone 1 battery, they are very close to the same size.
There was very little difference between those batteries. The TyTN 2 had a 1350mA hour lithium battery. The iPhone 1 had a 1400mA hour lithium battery. Practically no difference there in size or capacity.
So, no, the iPhone's battery was not a "technical marvel" any more than other phones of that era.
And in fact Apple's was a step back by being non-removable. I absolutely loved having a removable battery, because I could bring 2 or 3 with me on a long trip and never have to charge the phone. Apple was less functional in that way.
> "The iPhone "couldn’t do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."
https://www.redmondpie.com/blackberry-maker-rim-thought-appl...
This was a marketing and perception issue, not a price issue. When the original iPhone came out, I had a very nice blackberry, with a personal plan, effectively unlimited data, and the full blackberry suite (minus corporate integration, obviously). And I think it was less expensive than the iPhone plan. But it was a pain in the neck! I had to pick the correct phone plan, add the correct data supplement, negotiate the correct discount (basically everyone was eligible for a discount, but you had to find your particular reason for being eligible in a ridiculous menu), and then convince the sales person to add the special $3.99/mo supplement for blackberry services. It clearly never occurred to anyone involved that this was not a competent way to sell to consumers!
I did make fun of my friends for paying several dollars more per month for a device with no keyboard, no GPS, slower data, less efficient text input, and dramatically worse performance in marginal network conditions.
When I finally switched to an iPhone 3G, I could do real in the browser, but wow, the ability to make phone calls was seriously downgraded. I feel like my old blackberry may have had the best behaved cellular modem of any smart device I’ve ever owned.
I think that, if RIM had gotten YouTube and a music player working, had improved the web browser, and stuck a capacitive touch sensor on their device, and if they had marketed it competently (make it so that customers could walk into a store, pay $55/mo, and walk away with a working device without a fight!), they might have remained competitive.
Apple didn’t bother, they used an entirely different UI from the start, and it was a UI aimed at everyone from kids to grandparents, not just tech people.
that's because they half assed it.
There's always the risk that mobile phones supersedes the desktop, and thus cannibalize the desktop windows sales. Microsoft also likely not able to force OEM licensing in the same way that they could with windows on PC sellers.
If you could literally run windows apps on a phone back then, i reckon the MS phones would've at least grabbed some marketshare. Of course, the mobile hardware back then isn't as powerful, so there's the excuse that win32 cannot run there.
Except all of us who value privacy and security.
Face it: the major competition between app stores is not going to be on price, but a race to the bottom on who can allow apps to fuck over users the hardest.
If there's one company I don't expect that from, it's Apple. They may have highly dubious ethics but they are damn good at business and marketing, and I would be utterly shocked if they don't position themselves as the safe, privacy-friendly official app store. For people who don't enable side-loading, I wouldn't expect they'll even notice any changes.
And I'm sure Facebook is anticipating not having to ask for permission to hoover up all your personal data. Sure you don't need facebook, but if you want to be using WhatsApp to communicate with your friends and family, you might not have a choice. Shady companies that sell shady spyware to schools "for the children" are looking forward to a much easier time rolling out the most invasive ideas they have. The ad companies are I'm sure salivating over telemetry libraries with extra detailed modes for non-Apple app store installations.
But most of all, I look at Android where alternative app stores are possible with essentially no cost, and even with Amazon's enormous resources behind it, they could not get an alternative app store to catch on. I can't think of any reason why it would be different on iOS, so ultimately I suppose I expect this to go nowhere and a few years from now there will be the epic game store and the main app store and everything for nearly everybody will just be on the app store like it is now. The alternative stores will just have the apps that Apple wouldn't approve, like porn apps or privacy invasive, etc
Considering this hasn't happened on Android yet, I doubt you are in real trouble. Like it's not that they can really gain extra permissions (other than I guess tracking anything the app already has access to, but that isn't any different than currently) because they are sandboxed by the OS and limited in access through the permission system... I HOPE? RIGHT? @APPLE
And on the side of other app stores: there is F-Droid which is decently popular for OSS apps.
As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't plan to let this happen.
Nobody would be going after Apple if they had simply stopped their monopoly pricing scheme.
Its too late for that now. Now Apple is going to be forced, under threat of government action, to stop its anti-competitive actions.
We're a society of laws and they apply equally to everyone. If you don't like the laws either vote accordingly, talk to your representative, organise a political action, or leave for a more agreeable jurisdiction.
Also, the US fined Airbus $582 million in 2020.
Regulators don't seem to have had anything to do with it.
---
So what changed? Apple tells 9to5Mac that it has held further discussions with Epic. The result is that Apple has received proper commitment that Epic will play by the rules as legally defined.
“Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”
They fear the spotlight on the fact that even on alternate stores only accounts controlled by Apple can publish apps, which might become the focus of new regulations
This is the EU commissioner.
https://9to5mac.com/2024/03/08/apple-threaten-epic-illegal/
"""Even with screenshots, and assuming no false claims (which IIRC are entirely legal so long as you don't swear under oath), there's plenty of ways to mislead by omission while saying only true things.""" — works just as well in either direction.
Regulators have to look closely, if they take it on trust it's one Tim's word vs. the others'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39620099
This fallacy plays out a lot in politics. "Epic has lied in the past, so all parties involved must be lying."
I can't take both of them on faith alone, because at least one of them must be wrong. I'm not qualified to decide between them, so I should weight them equally. Public statements from the parties, or fans of the parties, are reasonable to suspect of being tactical with the truth even when no falsehoods are stated, rather than giving a complete picture.
Epic makes false statements because they have a megalomaniac CEO running the show, Apple on the other hand generally tries to avoid legal and PR troubles and has multiple teams of lawyers who review every public statement on an issue.
Not fully the truth, however -- according to APPLE, who are quoted in this one article. Tim Sweeny tweeted that the change was due to the EU DMA political proponents applying pressure to Apple.
The truth is not known, and it's not limited to Apple's side.
> “I take note with satisfaction that following our contacts Apple decided to backtrack its decision on Epic exclusion. From Day 2, #DMA is already showing very concrete results!” Breton said on Twitter/X.
We can't be certain it was the EU's pressure that made Apple react, but anything else seems rather unlikely.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/fortnite-...
This smells, you know? The timing is just so precise to be a coincidence.
Methinks this crowd loves regulation a bit too much.
The EU told Apple that breaking the law would have dire consequences. That's the only reason Apple backed down.
Stop spreading Apple propaganda.
You have no idea that this is what happened. You're the one spreading propaganda.
Why propagandize it at all?
EPIC hates Apple and wants to see the App store dead. Apple reasonably didn't trust EPIC not to play games with the DMA. The EU asked EPIC to give an assurance that they would play by the rules and then forced Apple to accept that assurance. Neither of them won anything. Apple is forced to let EPIC in, and EPIC is forced to accept that Apple is complying with the DMA.
That fits the facts. EPIC isn't a good guy. Apple isn't a good guy. The EU isn't a hero. Why try to paint any of them this way?
No they don't. They are absolutely still able to start a lawsuit, as is the EU.
We likely won't have to wait more than a couple weeks to see the lawsuits filed.
So then this would be the process of not accepting Apple's interpretation of the DMA.
Thats my point. That is the exact process for which they would be rejecting Apple's interpretation.
So no, they don't have to accept Apple's interpretation, instead they can go through this process.
Please don't try to start flame wars on HN. You should read the guidelines:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Disagree. EU regulators act quickly. Here's the commissioner for Internal Market of the Eu: "I take note with satisfaction that following our contacts Apple decided to backtrack its decision on Epic exclusion. From Day 2, #DMA is already showing very concrete results!" https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1766167580497117464
> “Following conversations with Epic, they have committed to follow the rules, including our DMA policies. As a result, Epic Sweden AB has been permitted to re-sign the developer agreement and accepted into the Apple Developer Program.”
Epic could have avoided all this by just responding to Apple and signing the EU Addendum affirming they would stick to the laws. Instead they wanted to get into the news cycle.
This is the policy they have to agree to: https://developer.apple.com/contact/request/download/alterna...
Includes the tweet as well as confirmation they that the commission did talk to Apple on Thursday
If any official action was taken it would have to be documented with a case: https://digital-markets-act-cases.ec.europa.eu/search
The EU has an long tradition of "conversations" and "questions" with an unstated "give the right answer and you can avoid an unpleasant official action".
You're right there is no official casework. That is also entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether or not Apple caved under pressure.
You are thinking of the mob. Thankfully here in the US official actions are generally done in view of the public.
The “probe” here would be, at least in the first instance, usually mostly letters asking questions. Note that it is “reportedly”; the media didn’t find this out because the DOJ had a banner on its website saying “we are investigating an alleged glass house”. That comes later, if things are not resolved.
You don’t want an official investigation, they are a complete nightmare that eat up months of work hours. Much better to spend a couple of days making sure you can give the correct answers on the first pass. Unless of course you genuinely believe the regulators are pushing beyond their remit, but know you’re voluntary signing up for an expensive and protracted fight.
(In some cases this is itself somewhat formalised.)
It's entirely possible the regulator asked EPIC to make an assurance that they would comply with Apple's rules, which are legal under the DMA, and then told Apple they'd need to accept the assurance.
If EPIC does now pull a stunt like they did in the US, the EU will now have reason to treat them with suspicion, and Apple will be able to point to the assurance as evidence that they accepted Apple's rules.
My guess is that they saw that all happening but Epic provided them a letter saying they double pinky promised, cross their hearts, will obey by the rules this time, which Apple will later try to use in court later on. Otherwise it doesn’t seem worth the risk prompting clearly foreseeable regulator action.
Apple banned Epic the day before DMA came into effect when doing this sort of thing was still legal, they 100% saw this. They did probably bet on the chance EU would overlook it if they did it before the law came into effect, they lost that bet but they thought it was worth a try.
There was a grace period for compliance for companies found in violation, because that determination was made after it came into force, not before.
You can't find a company to violate a regulation that's not in force, and it's reasonable to give a company in violation of complex piece of law (that's never been tested) some period to comply.
But that doesn't mean the law is not already in force.
After all, legal advice can usually be summed up as “if you do anything, someone can fuck you”, and do nothing isn’t a good business strategy.
Legal doesn't make decisions like this. That's not what they are paid to do.
Legal advises the executives of the consequences of decisions like this.
And if there's one thing that you should expect from people in positions of incredible power (executives), it's that they often believe that they are immune to the consequences of their decisions.
Most of the time they are right. Sometimes, they are not.
The main points of contention are: - the technology fee (the cost of advertising has already cut badly into their margins in the wake of identifier reform); - the clause making the Addendum also binding on any corporate parents and subsidiaries — the game industry is pretty consolidated and this limits the options for independent game studios which are also subsidiaries;
The fee is particularly nasty for hypercasual games, where a very realistic scenario has you paying for millions of installs, only to find your monetization lacking and you paying additional fees to the platform, of all things.
There are very real concerns with the Addendum and making signing only about Epic’s bona fides is reductive and wrong.
Apple backed down, like they did a week ago with PWAs.
Eh. Backing down would be Apple allowing non-WebKit browsers to run PWAs.
Apple can talk to the Commission all they want and persuade them not to take action. However, they cannot bend the ECJ's ear. If someone forces the issue through the courts (yes, it's a slow procedure and yes the ECJ can choose not to pick up a case, but that's down to the skills of the involved legal heads), what will matter is the directive as written.
Apple will likely continue to drag their feet, but the outcome looks fairly inevitable. It might well come when we've all moved on to "AI, show me data" instead of using browsers, but it will very likely come.
They then backed down after Open Web Advocacy ran surveys, an open letter and the EU started a investigation.
Apple releases developer notes containing changes included in its betas. Such a change should obviously have appeared right away when iOS 17.4 beta 1 was released. It did not.
After two weeks of backlash, Apple did confirm it was removing the feature in a public statement. They just did not want to announce it publicly before.
After two other weeks of bigger backlash and the start of an EU investigation, they publicly announced they would not remove the feature after all.
They 100% intended to remove the feature, and 100% backed down.
I think Apple may behave more creditably from here on out.
An ideology that helps you build and grow a new platform may not be equally suitable for running a dominant platform on which significant parts of the world economy depend.
In this case, they suspended the account, put themselves further into the spotlight, and then reactivated the account.
Hold in mind that everything involves trade offs. Authoritarianism is really good at monomaniacal focus on something that the dictator thinks is important, they just tend to fail at all the other stuff. And it is fine - indeed, remarkably effective - as long as people can leave when the focus isn't benefiting them.
Democracy sucks at pretty much everything except being flexible in the face of change and empowering voters. You do not want your food supply being run according to democratic principles, you want it to work.
[0] And most open source projects AFAIK
If you talk to the CEOs of large companies or miltary leaders, you find that they are unable to exert effective control of their organisations. The organisation will do whatever it wants to do. The leader can make their command but at every level through the organisation that command will be slightly subverted. The more layers, the less of that command will get through.
Since it's in the news, take for example Putin and Russia, Putin thought he had tank battalions that his lower downs had sold for parts decades ago. Based on the information in front of him, he should have taken Ukraine in several days regardless of resistance by the locals.
And whilst you might think it's impressive that he cut the budget in US congress to Ukraine, back-handed deals to send old Soviet equipment from 3rd party countries to Ukraine were made and now they are exhausted London is loaning Ukraine, Russia's money.
Putin's authoritarian Russia might be able to cut off the head of democracy but he's up against a five headed hydra. Democracy is a lot more scary than Authoritarism from a military perspective.
"You do not want your food supply being run according to democratic principles, you want it to work."
This is something that people don't really get, what's important is that the people delivering the food get the sack if they failed to do it. As long as that happens it's okay.
That's the reason why socialist and overly authoritarian countries have supply problems, they don't have an effective mechanism to replace failing organisations. Venezuela isn't able to extract Oil because the Oil dereks are run by the local dictator's family members.
Yes. But note that armies are a hierarchy with little flexibility once orders start coming down. When democracies want to achieve outcomes they set up (subordinate) dictatorships. The army does not stop to vote in the middle of a war. Indeed, sticking to the Ukraine example, they suspended elections as I assume is usual in war.
Democracy is a better model of governance because the military can focus on winning wars. In a dictatorship, the military has to focus on keeping the dictator in power - otherwise the dictator will get rolled. Since authoritarianism can only do one thing at once, generally they have a weak military at the expense of stability.
It doesn't matter where the power officially stems from, the decision making bandwidth and incentive structures govern results - and for companies that is a clear authoritarian model.
There can be, but it's not necessary in a democracy and you can design a democracy in which any action is subordinate to the demos should they choose to operate against it.
I wouldn't say Nazi Germany had a weak military. They had problems with too many tank models (to appease Hitler?) but they only begain losing the war when everyone else that was against them got their act together. And of course, invading Russia. That one was stupid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
Remember all this DMA stuff is coming from the same organization that wants to force Chrome and Firefox to accept TLS certificates issued by governments for any website they want: https://therecord.media/eu-urged-to-drop-law-website-authent...
Dma is mostly about choice for a couple of developers. Not for users. No way will Epic publish games on their own and Apples store, they did not do it with the Epic Store either. Consumers did not have a choice where to buy when Epic bought exclusive access.
I think their strategy is to move the point of reference for future negotiations to an extreme end of the spectrum of what could still be considered to comply with the letter of the law.
Economic growth isn't great but could be a lot worse if I look at the rest of the world.
Energy transition for sure has some huge challenges but again, we're doing pretty great compared to other places in the world.
Housing is an issue, but where isn't housing an issue?
Which 70 years?
After the gold standard everyone except the US has been paying for it
The EU is infinitely better than living in the states. At least for this third world immigrant.
I think the bread in the US, sans the supermarket stuff, is generally exceptional with bakeries throughout most cities that are top notch. Some of the best creameries in the world are in the US now. Beer is also generally more innovative and better. There is also a much broader food community in that I can eat food from every culture on earth with pretty high quality in every city. Europe tends to be much less diverse and less creative in its foods. However, yes, if you only eat fast food and shop at big box grocery stores (which also exist in Europe) staples are pretty low quality.
The US has a very strong and thriving food movement, and isn’t a strict monoculture by geography. There are layers upon layers of cultures intertwined throughout the country. Generically “American culture” is essentially a marketing regime for large companies selling their stuff. But the reality of America is much more complex than that, and that’s accelerated since the 1950’s, and was completely broken down in the 1990’s.
Most of the polarization stems from that destruction of the American monoculture belief system and a reaction against that. It’s the last gasp of people who see a way of thinking falling apart. But what comes out of that cultural change is excellent bread, cheese, beer, etc.
This whole thread is just bizarre.
If I go to your average Italian city I simply won’t find good Thai food. I’ll get a lot of great Italian food for sure. But no Malay, no Nepalese, no afghan, no Peruvian, etc. I’m sure you’ll find counter examples, but the US genuinely is a melting pot with well established ethnic subcultures of all cultures on earth and the general society is pretty open. There’s no French nationalism etc. The thing is there’s no established cultural monoculture like you find in most of the world - what people mistake for a lack of culture in America is that it’s a palimpsest of hundreds of cultures, and they all bring their foods to the American table.
This isn’t a knock on the modern multiculturalism in Europe, it’s more a statement that the established historic cultures in Europe squeeze out the diversity more than in the US with its lack of established historic culture that has almost entirely evaporated in the last 80 years.
Also, in your average Italian city, the average meal will still be healthier than the average American meal. The idea of food deserts is what doesn’t exist in Europe, at least not Western Europe. The local mom and pop shops still have veggies and fruits, and I was amazed to find none within biking distance when I was in the US.
I don’t want to have to need to shop at Trader Joes, Whole Foods, or live in a posh city to avoid having to eat over-processed food and be constipated all of the time.
Who told you that? I mean, it’s certainly the case in some places (particularly in large affluent cities), but, much like in the US, it’s variable. If you take EU countries and the US and rank by home ownership percentage, the US is on the low end (even Ireland, with its long-running nationwide housing crisis, beats the US here). Notably _Germany_ is much lower (65% of US homes are owner occupied, 50% of German homes), but Germany’s an outlier in Europe on this; to a large extent it’s driven by below-cost social housing.
TSMC's delays have to do with not offering enough pay not a lack of people capable of installing wafer fab tools or building electrical or mechanical systems for fabs.
Every country talks 'free trade!' out of one side of their mouth, and implements protectionism via various concerns about health/safety/fairness out of the other when it's expedient. The US isn't any different, it's just not tech companies we're worried about (except some clock app that the Gen Z kids are obsessed with).
But guess who pays the best bribes?
(that was free, I’ll take the downvotes)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_App_Markets_Act
How did I know that she was the one opposing it? I'm not glad she's dead, but I am glad she isn't on the Senate any more.
Given the way both teams are playing this season, I wouldn't be surprised if they managed that.
No good guys was fairly unambiguous I thought.
Apple already had their date with the FTC over dark patterns... 2014 and 36 million later the message was sent.
IN 22 when Epic gets the same slap on the wrist, its for 250million in excess CC charges and 250 million for COPPA violations.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/12/...
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/19/23516925/epic-games-ft...
Oh wait, half a billion dollars isn't a slap on the wrist is it?
Apple at least has the decency to tell you up front and clearly how they are going to stick it to you. Epic stabs you in the back while picking your pocket and then locks you out, the FTC fines reflect how egregious their actions were.
Edit: sorry, loot box revenue
Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618673 - March 2024 (980 comments)
I know some here would welcome a single browser target, but I personally think it concentrates too much power with Google.
Privacy is a related concern. I think it’s only going to take one killer app to really launch an alternative App Store. A few years ago when Fortnite was super popular, Fortnite fans would have installed an Epic store in a heart beat if it meant they could play Fortnite.
Once an alternative App Store has significant power, I think they are going to be able to start eroding some of the iOS privacy guarantees. That will be done in the name of consumer interest - things are cheaper here because we can give you better, targeted ads! - but in the long run I don’t think teenagers getting some special Fortnite loot is in their best interests if it means tighter surveillance.
I could also see school districts and/or testing organizations require installations of super invasive anti-cheating apps. There have already been cases of school districts getting caught spying on kids with school issued laptop webcams.
In the end, Apple’s stubbornness and greed brought this on. If they would have been more reasonable, I think both the company and their users would be a lot better off.
I believe that overall the DMA is a good thing, there are some things I would change, but this gives me new perspective on the matter. Cheers.
I wonder if something happened behind the scenes.
And, bro, “status quo” is literally a form of bias, not reasoning
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More logically, the United States is reluctant to regulate phone shipments because Apple and Google constitute the strongest surveillance network ever exported internationally. Europe stands to lose nothing if Epic or Spotify go bankrupt, the 'muh protectionism' argument only makes sense from the perspective of companies that actually matter. So obviously there has to be something bigger at play, the Commission wouldn't be listening to scoundrels and nobodies unless they said something that made sense.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
But please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Almost every developer pays 15%. You only pay 30% if you earn more than a million dollars a year from the App Store.
But banning epic was just pathetic baby behavior.
I hope epic launches the epic game store for iOS and its dogshit but cheaper and the gacha gravy boats all jump ship
Apple has said as much for the main developer account in the past.
It is highly unlikely Epic would publish anything in the App Store, however, even ignoring the bad blood.
Part of operating an App Marketplace is that you are agreeing to the EU rules which include a core technology fee. So even an app with no in-app purchasing on the Apple App Store would cost them a substantial amount to publish.
Apple overplayed their anti-competitive card, so now they'll be permanently scrutinized.