This has clearly been tilting at windmills this entire time. They were never going to win. How much time and money could they have saved by giving a reasonable amount instead of sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “la la la I can’t hear you why do you love criminals”?
Has the commission confirmed that these changes "resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission" or is that just like... Apple's wishful thinking.
I definitely recall previous iterations where Apple announced changes to comply with legal requirements where the authorities ended up saying "this absolutely doesn't resolve the issue".
Yeah. Also, IANAL but even if the European Commission does think Apple's interpretation of the DMA is reasonable, Apple could still be sued by an affected company or person, and a judge might disagree, IIUC: https://bureaubrandeis.com/private-enforcement-of-the-dma-a-...
> Web distribution, which is available only in the EU ... require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats.
This is quite a big change for EU users. What I don't understand is how Apple will track the new 5% commission for web distributed apps. You do need to register for the programme, so maybe that is one way they track businesses and get a right to audit their books.
It also seems they are very strict regarding who can notarize their apps.
> Companies will now qualify if they:
> * Meet a moderate financial-stability bar as scored by Dun & Bradstreet.
> * Are publicly traded or owned by a publicly traded company.
> * Have received venture funding from an established investment firm.
> * Have completed a financial audit by a licensed accountant.
> * Are a government entity, educational institution, or nonprofit.
Those requirements apply to direct distribution or alternate marketplaces. Developers not meeting those criteria can still participate in non-Apple distribution by submitting to an alternate marketplace.
The "alternative marketplace" should be replaced with "no marketplace." How do people accept this "alternative marketplace" idea? This is obviously a way to increase friction in order to maintain dominance - and the solution is obvious - no marketplace at all.
>What I don't understand is how Apple will track the new 5% commission for web distributed apps.
My guess: since all apps will need to be notarized, even web distributed ones, your phone will phone home to Apple servers when you first launch it (and periodically afterwards), to verify it isn’t in a revocation list. That will allow Apple to track unique installs and then bill the Apple developer account based on pricing data reported by the web distributor as part of their separate agreement with Apple.
> Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats.
Apple and EU keep the power to ban your app if it goes against "European" values.
> For App Store apps that link out of the app to complete purchases, the commission will be 15 percent. Developers in the programs mentioned above will pay a reduced rate of 10 percent.
What the fuck. Does this also include apps that keep purchase management entirely out of the app? And if so, is that even legal?
If you place an upsale button in your app and then break out from the app to complete the purchase, yes. Are you living under a rock? It’s been like this for a bit. You want to avoid it? Don’t place the upsale button in your app.
* They have for years turned a blind eye to apps that sell things that aren't "digital goods" - so the Barnes & Noble app can sell you a physical book and pay $0 to Apple, but if they sell you an ebook in any way in the app, they owe 30%. But if they sell you an ebook in Safari, back to $0.
All of it's purely arbitrary and based on whatever the max Apple thinks they can skim from every transaction based on what leverage they have. The App Store has corrupted Apple into a form I don't even recognize anymore.
In the past, all In-App purchases were distributed by Apple, so that in the shipping fee for your digital good. Apple needs to catch up with the changing requirements, so digital goods delivered by the developer’s infrastructure shouldn’t have a commission.
"Distributed" ... LOL. That's certainly how they want the media and casual observers to see it. Meanwhile, what's mainly being sold as IAP is "Gems" or "Gold" or "Robux" -- incrementing numbers in a table in a Postgres DB somewhere. Or toggling a plist value in your app, for "unlock pro version" or "remove ads."
> "These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution."
[...]
> "The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee."
[...]
> "In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats."
This is bonkers, I can't believe the EU Commission agreed to it. The main issue that the DMA was about still remains: Apple retains ultimate control over app developers' dealings with users.
The status quo that the EU should have pushed for, and which Article 6(7) of the DMA requires, is one where a developer can distribute iOS apps to users without ever entering into any contractual relationship with Apple. The OS APIs that most apps use are already paid-for by the user when they buy the device. Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia already in them.
Of course, Xcode and the SDK overall aren't paid for by users, so Apple can charge devs for it, but so far there's no way to signal to Apple that you have opted out of using their SDK and have the fee waived. Not that it would be enough anyway, since even having to interact with Apple in any capacity to be an iOS dev is the main problem.
yeah, I think for as much as many of us hold out hope that the EU will break the back of these brazen monopolists, there's a limit to their friendliness to the actual interests of consumer freedom when it's got to be balanced by their love of censorship.
Do you mean “censorship by the EU” or “censorship within the EU”, or both? Because I see a lot of the latter, and I don’t find it inconsequential at all.
By the EU and in Germany, really... What is censored in other member states isn't in the news, but for all I know it's also not much and not important.
The whole EU censorship rhetoric is almost always devoid of facts and examples. I feel like it is mainly sustained because US people like the narrative that theytl are the free(TM).
Asking innocent questions often works better than confrontation, but yeah, this elevated importance of utmost free speech doesn't survive the Atlantic crossing and can be used to maliciously pooh-pooh Europe to an American audience.
We don't have a lot of "censorship within the EU", some russian propaganda tv channels might be blocked (as they should) but that's about it really. Now if you mean in a particular EU member, that's different but it's not impacting the whole EU.
is like much of the discourse around the changes, overly sensationalized and borderline false.
The only change made that's relevant to sideloading-a-downloaded-APK as far I understand, is a 24hour delay in enabling the ability to do so, which is a wildly overblown non-issue.
It’s a one time delay that occurs when you first enable the ability to install downloaded apks and you never see it again for any device attached to your Google account. That’s why I called it a wildly overblown non-issue
Wait, which apps are you referring to having been delisted by EU (which branch? what process?), as opposed to "breaching app store terms and conditions" (which the companies do of their own initiative all the time)
Do you have any more sympathetic examples that aren't enemy propagandists? I feel getting banned from the app store is getting off lightly compared to, say, Julius Streicher.
But as the API surface expands, making a compatible competitor becomes increasingly difficult. Look at how long WINE has been developed and how it still isn’t done.
The first third party iPhone apps existed before the SDK existed. iPhone OS was jailbroken pretty quickly and apps emerged fast. SDKs are nice references and tools but the're not the only way to skin a cat.
> The OS APIs that most apps use are already paid-for by the user when they buy the device.
That argument would assume no cost for upgrades.
I remember having to buy new operating systems.
That said, looking at the state of recent OS upgrades, I think I'd have been happy if the only changes over the last, oh, decade or so, had been purely security updates. But these too are not free.
> Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia in them.
Yes, obviously they want to make as much money as possible, and this is at odds with consumer interests.
That said, I have the impression that for many users, the benefit is the app ecosystem, while for many developers the benefit is the users. Endless marketing cycles of new-shiny-API for one, and new-shiny-UI for the other.
That said, power-law distribution, so "the app ecosystem" is probably mostly Meta, Google, Amazon, as specific names, then becoming somewhat vague with "whatever work mandated of Slack or MS teams", "their bank", "three or four supermarkets", and "a taxi firm who may or may not be Uber".
>Yes, obviously they want to make as much money as possible, and this is at odds with consumer interests.
It's not at odds with consumer interests at all. It's at odds with developer interests.
It would actually cost consumers more if Apple couldn't make any money from developers directly because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
Developers might prefer to shift the burden to consumers's wallets instead of their own, but overall this model is beneficial for everyone involved. It is also better for the environment because directly making money from developers incentivizes them to support old hardware for as long as possible.
> because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
> Developers might prefer to shift the burden to consumers's wallets
I vigorously disagree with this. It sounds very confused about economics, specifically prices.
Apple, as every market actor does, charges the absolute maximum price the market will bear for their products and not a penny less. They cannot "make up" any money that comes from unrelated parties (such as their Google payola for search, or their casino games for children IAP revenue) by raising product prices. If they could raise their product prices and have that be profit-positive, they would have done it yesterday.
They could raise prices on phones to make up for a hypothetical "free iCloud+," because the same consumers are the other party in both those transactions so presumably many people would see that the more expensive phone justifies free iCloud services.
Apple doesn't set its prices by saying "OK, we need exactly 83 billion dollars in net income this year, so given that our products cost us 233 billion dollars to make and we have 54 billion dollars in expenses, we need 383 billion in revenue, so now let's set prices of each product to target this."
That $83 billion in net income is just the number they are able to make last year with the prices being what the market would bear. Trying to increase prices to hold it there when a downfall in other revenue happens would depress sales.
That's just not how that works, how much consumers will pay is a binding constraint. Apple isn't subsiding their phone with developer fees and distributing their below marginal cost. Apple is almost certainly charging well above its marginal costs and is already charging the revenue maximising price, it's not willingly leaving money on the table.
Not entirely how you've made formed this connection but respectively it sounds like you've confused several things here.
They are obviously not charging the maximum price because they’ve raised the price significantly when the iPhone X came out and suffered no harm. Apple sets prices based on a 30% raw profit margin and ignores the market except as it constrains their raw material and manufacturing costs. They use that 30% to pay there other costs, such as iOS development and R&D and investing in manufacturing partners.
The iPhone X, like all models, is a different model than all the others; the maximum price for one model is not going to be the maximum price for another.
> Apple sets prices based on a 30% raw profit margin and ignores the market except as it constrains their raw material and manufacturing costs.
Literally impossible ahead of time, as some of their costs are fixed rather than marginal. If you spend, as they did last year, ~$34.5bn on R&D, and you make a thing that costs $1000 to make and then you price it at $1300, but the market looks at what it is and what it costs and says "nah" so only 1 million people buy it that year, then what you're actually making isn't a 30% profit, it is a loss >110x your revenue.
> It would actually cost consumers more if Apple couldn't make any money from developers directly because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
iPhone sales pay for the entirety of Apple's R&D. 10 times over.
> That said, power-law distribution, so "the app ecosystem" is probably mostly...
If you want to frame it as Apple screwing other big corporations, fine...
Is it alright for Apple to tax direct competitors to their own services, like Netflix and Spotify? And if they don't pay, to ban those competitors from telling their users how to sign up? When Apple's competing alternative is bundled with the device, advertised in the OS, and lets you subscribe in the app?
The total cost of supporting the hardware via the OS is easily baked in to the exorbitant hardware cost, or failing that, could easily be baked in.
And you can tell this is the case because they do eventually drop support for old phones. Its not like they give you forever security updates because you buy apps.
> [“The Commission welcomes the changes made by Apple to its commercial terms,” commented a spokesperson for the European Commission. This announcement, the spokesperson continues, is “the result of close dialogue between the Commission and Apple,” after the tech giant was found in April 2025 to have breached the rules of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and ordered to take the necessary corrective measures. In light of these developments and the changes to be introduced, “the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new conditions.”](https://www.eunews.it/en/2026/08/18/tracking-and-new-commerc...)
> In a statement, a Commission spokesperson welcomed Apple’s changes to its business terms, which it said “follow a close dialogue between the Commission and Apple”.
> “Following today’s announcement, the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new terms,” it added.
There's nothing on the commission webpage, all I could find is the above comments from a spokesperson which aren't hugely definitive.
I think we can take the mention of dialogue to mean the commission thinks the new rules are a step forward enough that wider civil society can have a look and maybe kick up a stink, and the absence of press release coordinated with Apple as evidence the procedure is still open
> Apple retains ultimate control over app developers' dealings with users.
The app developers can offer their own line of devices on the market. Users are free to choose a different manufacturer. Apple doesn't hold anybody in chains, it is people and developers who are coming to them.
Or should people to restaurants and demand to be allowed to order food delivery from other places to their tables, and bring their own drinks? Honestly, I think that most hackers and EU bureaucrats think that it would be a splendid idea.
> Or should people to restaurants and demand to be allowed to order food delivery from other places to their tables, and bring their own drinks?
A restaurant is private property, you're just a customer in someone else's turf. An iPhone (and the individual iOS copy inside it that provides the advertised functionality) is the intellectual property of Apple, but also the private property of the user, and it is the traditional property ownership status that determines who gets to interact with the functionality. Apple is unfairly forcing themselves into the dev-user relationship here.
An iPhone is the private property of the user, and if you are skilled enough you can jailbreak it and there is nothing Apple can do about it. If you're not skilled to do it, then that's your own problem. No court of law would go against you if you took a soldering iron and your expertise to change your iPhone in any way you please. Apple shouldn't be obliged to help you in those efforts, though.
> Apple is unfairly forcing themselves into the dev-user relationship here.
Who was forced to buy an iPhone? Who was forced to develop for Apple devices?
> An iPhone is the private property of the user, and if you are skilled enough you can jailbreak it and there is nothing Apple can do about it. If you're not skilled to do it, then that's your own problem.
No, because Apple chooses to prevent me from controlling the device the way I want. The skill involved is about finding holes in the system, not in enabling an "expert mode" or something.
The imbalance of power is itself a problem. A hardware manufacturer should be legally prohibited from designing their devices in such a way that they retain more control over them post-sale than the actual owner. Device ownership should mean maximum control over code execution.
> Who was forced to buy an iPhone?
Nobody, but I'm not a free market absolutist.
> Who was forced to develop for Apple devices?
Every developer who wants to cater to ~half of the mobile user population (~85% if it's young Americans)
I assume an expert mode (where you can sideload anything you want) is what you are asking for. To that I raise the standard objection: how do you protect grandma from having a criminal social-engineer her into enabling expert mode and then having her sideload malware onto her device?
I mean if you're gonna stop people from owning their device and doing what they want with it just because of the possibility of crime occurring then their are quite a few more things that probably should also no longer exist because of their potential use in crime.
That's a pretty ridiculous argument if you ask me.
That is exactly what Apple has decided to do. You have named the tradeoff. Stop the possibility by disabling everyone. It has always been this way. People have had nearly 20 years to leave Apple
You can say that about a lot of things in life. Legalized gambling, for example. Tons of people ruin their lives with it and this creates big externalities for society. But we tolerate it so that everyone has the freedom to gamble.
Apple on the other hand offers a locked down product that many people want because they don’t trust themselves. I think a lot of people have short memories for all the hacking and spyware that plagued Windows users a couple decades ago. I think we also need to remember that Apple is not the government so people have alternatives to buying their devices.
Personally, I think people should have the right to buy a locked down device. It’s not on Apple to provide open competitors to their product. And why should developers have a right to develop for the platform? Heck, I wanted the iPhone back when it didn’t even have 3rd party apps at all.
>>hacking and spyware that plagued Windows users a couple decades ago
And that still plagues every computing platform now. Including Apple platforms. So the lockdown clearly didn’t completely solve that problem like a lot of people seem to claim
> Apple on the other hand offers a locked down product that many people want because they don’t trust themselves
The idea that, for many people purchasing an iPhone, the inability to install apps from alternative stores or the web is a selling point seems rather questionable.
On top of that this could easily be provided by an optional switch that enables you to enforce this on your own device if you so desire.
It is a poor reason to request that all app distribution for everyone else also has to go through Apple and its terms, basically for your convenience.
I’ve already given one reason why the switch is a bad idea. Another reason is that powerful third parties such as Meta and Google could force users to disable their own protections and give those apps full access to all data as a condition of installation.
Ultimately, an option becomes a requirement and then the protection for users is totally gone.
> No, because Apple chooses to prevent me from controlling the device the way I want.
They have no power to prevent you from doing anything you want to your device. Just like Ford has no power to stop me from modifying my truck in any way I want. Or any other product from any other company.
Not helping you is something different, that's not preventing.
> Every developer who wants to cater to ~half of the mobile user population (~85% if it's young Americans)
That's a choice for them to make. You might then say that Coca-Cola is forcing supermarkets to carry their product because customers want to buy them.
> They have no power to prevent you from doing anything you want to your device. Just like Ford has no power to stop me from modifying my truck in any way I want. Or any other product from any other company.
They have the technical ability to prevent me from running the code I want, and they exercise that ability for that purpose. They're not a passive actor in this situation, they explicitly block me from doing things that they themselves can do, even after the sale.
Again, this should be a concern merely because of the power imbalance.
> That's a choice for them to make. You might then say that Coca-Cola is forcing supermarkets to carry their product because customers want to buy them.
Not the same thing at all. The mobile app market is a top-level one in a way the Coca-Cola one is not. Apple is controlling a huge amount of commerce for products that have nothing to do with them, besides being digital accessories to iDevices.
The better analogy would be: there are only two store companies in the entire US. If you want to sell any product at all, of any category (silverware, food, lawnmowers etc) you must contract with them and there's no other way, and anyone who wants to purchase any product whatsoever only has those two options.
So if you were forced to keep f.e. a door lock on your house (that you bought), because as part of the purchase the developer required it - would you be fine with it too? You could technically jail break it...
> which unfair market conditions made it impossible
Bank applications depending on various os or device level security features? Good luck getting developers to build applications for your platform in general until you have a very large number of users (even Microsoft couldn’t manage it when the oligopoly was way less entrenched)
Well then you aren't forced to purchase an iPhone, are you? Much less forced to develop for an iPhone. If a developer isn't satisfied with having access to billions of Android customers, then they should change careers or stop complaining.
Developers also had every opportunity in the world to offer their software for Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices. Or offer their own devices with their software. Which is an easy thing for banks to do. Their laziness and incompetence isn't an excuse for them to turn around and point fingers at Apple for being successful. They made their own bed.
> with having access to billions of Android customers
The average Android user is almost worthless financially compared to the average iPhone user. If you calculate the market share based on revenue and jot total users Apple has a much bigger proportion of the pie than the raw user base would suggest.
> Which is an easy thing for banks to do.
The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.
Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly, the government’s job is to make sure that markets are competitive.
> around and point fingers at Apple for being successful. They made their own bed.
To get into the position where you can abuse your position in the market you have to do something right, certainly. That doesn’t mean you should be allowed to do that in perpetuity.
> The average Android user is almost worthless economically compared to the average iPhone user.
But how and why is Apple to be blamed for that?
> The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.
The culprits are the banks, who aren't offering their customers adequate service. The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.
> Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly
Some of the biggest companies in the world are competing against each other on smart phones. And customers have a great variety of devices to choose from. Smart phones is a prime example on where the free market worked: Fierce competition between several very large companies resulted in amazing devices being offered to customers. And since customers are free to choose what they purchase, they will choose the best device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable. Companies who cannot offer good enough products fall away from the competition by the nature of the free market: Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Siemens, and more. All of them were powerful corporations.
Current hacker ideology has mixed the worst parts of capitalism and communism into weird standpoints which make no sense. Am I supposed to feel sorry that developers (they are mostly giant corporations) can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? And that therefore the government should intervene to guarantee the profits of these giant corporations?
Enough, already. Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition. Let them have their win, and if they are acting against the interest of their consumers, then they won't have their win for long.
It’s not about blame, the point of anti trust and competition laws is just that, maximize competition and consumer surplus. Yes that inherently penalizes the most successful companies we collectively as a society judged that to be a fair bargain.
> The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.
Sure, it’s easier to go after Apple not banks, though.
> have a great variety of devices to choose from
Physical hardware sure. Effectively there is no choice when it comes to software though.
> device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable
Sure, but again physical hardware is not whats being discussed here. All major device manufacturers make it either were hard or impossible to install alternative operating systems (especially that got much worse for Android devices over the years).
> can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? A
When it comes to certain sectors that’s true. Or rather you are supposed to pay a very significant proportion of your revenue as rent to Apple to for very little in return (Apple benefits almost as much from third party developers as developers do from Apple).
> Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition
Yeah, that how most monopolies work. They are just outright better than their competition until they are in a dominant position and can get a higher proportion of the pie because they ran all the competitors out of business. That’s exactly when regulators should intervene to make the market more efficient.
Based on empirical evidence free/efficient markets can almost never exist without regulation.
A much more accurate nonsensical analogy would be getting take out but only being allowed to eat it with Apple branded utensils because otherwise your food would catch fire.
> Users are free to choose a different manufacturer
It’s an oligopoly, so no, consumers are not exactly free to do what they want. If the market were truly competitive you might have a point.
> For users under 13 years old, apps from the App Store cannot link out to websites for transactions to protect against the risk of scams that target younger kids.
So that means Fortnite can't link out, right? Or does this mean because it's being delivered by the Epic Games Store, they can bypass that rule?
It depends on how old the user is. If the player is over 18, Fortnite can link out. I guess you call some Apple API to link out and they check the user's age for you before deciding if its allowed or not?
> Apple today announced changes to its business terms for apps in the European Union, following close collaboration with the European Commission. These changes resolve Apple’s disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution.
this seems to imply the Commission signed off on this. I really can't imagine that this changes anything meaningfully wrt to the DMA?
I think it explicitly avoids directly saying that the Commission has agreed this resolves the disagreements, again hoping public sentiment will drive the nail all the way.
I am really hoping this isn’t the end of it, general purpose computing devices need to allow its user to choose the security model, in my opinion the entire industry fundamentally depends on it, and without that freedom we will have monopolies deciding everything sooner or later.
I disagree. Developer machines have to be open, others maybe yes maybe not. Users can choose their security model by the machine they buy.
The closed model has been very good for both developers and consumers. If we use Android as a counterfactual to iOS there are entire swaths of apps that are available on one that are not on the other. Android is more amenable to open source apps and whatever Apple doesn’t on its store. But it is also easier to pirate and download cracked software.
My own interest in making music exposed me to a stark difference between Android and iOS. There is an enormous number of audio apps available on iOS that simply don’t exist in Android. There are a fair number of apps that mirror windows and Mac apps but are far far cheaper on iOS. I am convinced that the console approach to iOS apps is responsible for the existence of a lot of apps that wouldn’t be offered otherwise.
We are better off with a mix of platform types. I can’t imagine any real way a development machine could be completely locked down. They have to be able to run arbitrary code.
Following this to its logical conclusion… “Sorry, you didn’t buy a Development Pro Guitar. Please bring it in to your nearest Apple repair shop to get it retuned or restringed”
See? “Development machine” just means the ability to do what you want with your own machine. No third party interference.
Let Timmy Can’t-Tune bring his guitar to someone who can. Let grandma have her new phone be setup by her grandson appropriately so she can’t install malware.
> The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee.
[...]
> In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats.
All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
The messages on Mac are becoming more ridiculous and cumbersome each upgrade though. Kind of sick of jumping through System Settings hoops every time I upgrade an app
Every time I’m forced to do it[0] I feel good because I’m glad these hoops are unavoidable on all the computers of the people I provide family tech support for.
[0] Which is rare. I’m installing random shit all the time using homebrew and it’s basically never an issue.
Except that it's easier to invalidate an entire signing certificate than to hope your malware definition satisfies all mechanically generated permutations of the malware.
How does that help you when the malware authors can get more signing certificates the same way they got the first one?
Notice that this is easier for malware authors to do than ordinary people because their business is compromising others' machines, so then they can use the signing keys of any victims who have a developer account, or sign up for new ones using stolen cards from any of the victims.
Meanwhile you would then have Apple revoking the victims' signing certificates and screwing their honest users who can now no longer install the non-malicious software they previously released.
The entire premise is a scam to extract an annual fee from a million small developers.
You know what's even easier than getting a signing certificate for malware? Not bothering with signing at all.
And revoking a cert for one "dev" does not mean revoking everything, as for them stealing signing keys from other devs (not typical users, but security literate) how often does that happen, especially in the case of apple with sandboxing etc?
If you’re a developer you can kind of do it, or so ChatGPT tells me:
> So for, say, your iPad mini plus 2–5 other iPads, the workable setup is: Mac + Xcode → $99/year developer membership → register each iPad's UDID → create an Ad Hoc build → install that build on those devices. You don't have to publish it, make it discoverable, or have Apple review it.
That would work for me, except that I prefer to build web apps instead. There’s nothing I really want to build that couldn’t be done as a web app.
As for why one computing platform would be different than another, if you don’t think there’s any difference then why not use a Raspberry Pi or something?
Because a Raspberry Pi would be very inconvenient to use as a smartphone, obviously. Doesn't explain why it makes sense to treat one ARM computer as a mildly locked jail (Macs) and another as a hard locked jail (iPhones and other handhelds); I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
> I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
This is older than the current smartphone duopoly; IIRC, with a few exceptions like the N900 and the Palm Treo, cell phones were always very locked down. It probably came initially from the phone companies being control freaks, and wanting to restrict which devices (even mechanical ones with no electrical or radio interface) could be attached to their phone system.
Yes, phone companies did not want this parties devices attached to their analog network, which basically was a low voltage power grid.
I don't know if we can say that those old phones were locked down: either they could not run any software at all or they run only what they got in their factory settings.
Symbian phones, palmtops from the 90s and the like could run apps and I did write a few of them. Usually Java and an emulator on my computer and an upload to the phone. They were almost general purpose computing devices but it was hard to get a 30% tax on them. All of these policies from Apple derive from the will of making money from services, not only from the hardware. It's understandable because it's a lot of money.
If apps will ever start losing money to Apple (e.g. they are forced to distribute them for free), apps will be dead, the Store will shut down, nothing could be installed anymore (privacy, safety, think of the children) and everything will be done with a web browser.
You technically don’t need to pay if you just want to run your app on your phone. If you want to distribute your app with Testflight or the App Store you need to pay.
As long as you're willing to re-sign and reinstall it every 7 days, that is. The free certificates Apple hands out have expiry set to a week, and AFAIK you can't configure your own iPhone to trust your own certificate.
If what we were discussing was hacky ways of installing apps on your own device rather than distribution to end users, you can do without the Developer membership cost.
It would just be limited to 3 apps per device that require to be refreshed every 7 days to continue to be able to open them.
Web apps are a non starter for iOS since the only allowed browser on iOS happens to not support crucial standards and may drop your app's persistent data.
> Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
Because malware breaking the sandbox of one of them can mostly only spy on the owner, while malware breaking the sandbox of the other can spy on whoever the owner walks past, GPS trace their movements…
Question for those with more industry knowledge than me: If you assume a broken sandbox, is it possible for an app to record phone calls, then use that recording to create a deepfaked voice that can then be transmitted as a new call? My naïve assumption is "yes obviously", but for all I know the hardware has some way to activate a switched circuit from the phone service to the speaker and microphone that can't have other sound data pass through it.
> Because malware breaking the sandbox of one of them can mostly only spy on the owner, while malware breaking the sandbox of the other can spy on whoever the owner walks past, GPS trace their movements…
LOL. That security bogeyman argument is a convenient post-hoc justification. The real reason is much simpler: Because "computers" started out with "Owner can run code of their choice on it" as one of the main definitional qualities agreed upon by the market.
Devices which only ran code that the vendor had specially packaged for the device always had other names, like Games Console, Word Processor, MP3 Player, Graphing Calculator, or just plain "Toy." Nobody confused those with computers and nobody accepted them as computers.
Phones entered this world already in that second category, long before Apple even considered making one. Apple kept an iron grip at first and after careful consideration, decided to only allow third-parties to even enter on terms extremely favorable and profitable to Apple, and always under their direct control.
Closing off the Mac would be very messy and also cause tremendous headaches due to it being the development platform for iOS. They don't want to bother. But the reason iOS is closed is because it's always been closed, and they'll never open it unless forced, because money.
Most people consider the iPhone as a "phone", not as a "computer". It's even in the name. So it fits your definition for devices which only run code that the vendor had specially packaged.
People obviously consider it a computer; they install and use third party software on it. The question is whether the vendor should be allowed to monopolize the market for the third party software even when both the user and the third party developer don't want them to.
I respect your overall point but I think the picture is more nuanced than that. "Computer" as a term is simply unpopular, in favor of something referencing the intended application, as determined by things like the form factor:
Graphing Calculators are computers in every sense, it's hard to find one you can't at least program in a high level language like Basic or Python, and many accept assembly programs - even Texas Instruments models did, before their signing keys were brute forced.
Games consoles too almost invariably run third party code, although they tend not to be end user programmable - no different than an iPhone in that regard, really.
"Feature phones" - pre-smartphone phones with cameras and internet etc - usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer blessing, even though you couldn't touch the OS. You could SSH into servers from those!
I think a big problem is that the distinction between "general purpose computer" and "end user programmable general purpose computer" is functionally meaningless when you can't write programs, which is most people. Instead they understand it in a functional context - what is this device for? How does it compare to how such devices usually work? The general purpose CPU inside is an implementation detail, and just because you think of an iPhone as a computer doesn't mean everyone does. They think of it as a "phone".
> usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer
I had to respond first to this - I happened to grow up with Verizon phones. They had the manufacturers ship variants that replaced Java with BREW - some locked-down bastardized atrocity with DRM, which could only be acquired through purchasing in an on-device App Store (Called "Get It Now"). I knew about how everyone else had Java on their dumbphones though. But overall in that era the meme is accurate that if you even accidentally pushed the "Internet" button on your phone, the ensuing insane per-KB data charges would be noticeable. No one I know used any such apps or features.
Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest "end user programmable" was a requirement to be a computer. I meant that the computer owner expects that the computer manufacturer isn't gatekeeping.
Now, a GameCube or PlayStation buyer may have seen the gatekeeping as a positive -- knowing that Nintendo wouldn't bless a cartridge/disc that was pornographic, bomb-making instructions, or what have you, they felt it was a safer device to put in a kid's bedroom than a Windows XP computer.
I posit: To normal people, "A computer" is a subset of devices which, conceptually speaking, wants to be usable for a maximum of purposes. In other words, if you gave someone a variety of tasks (Edit the file on this flash drive, do your taxes, sort 100 photos into 3 folders based on occasion and print the best 3 of each, find an email you sent 3 months ago and quote excerpts from it) and then presented them with a bunch of devices from all the categories I mentioned, basically everyone knows a Mac or Windows PC will do that well, and anything else will lack important tools like the filesystem, drivers for hardware, reasonable multitasking, capable browsers, etc and make those tasks painful at best. And if specialized software is needed, that software will likely not run on those other devices.
Every other modern device, including my Apple Watch to a Chromebook to a PS5, is more than capable of all those tasks computationally, but the manufacturers specifically crippled many abilities and blocked all non-blessed software, and Nintendo or Samsung doesn't want you running TurboTax on the Switch or your Smart Fridge.
One thing that ticks me off about this conversation is they are always framed as anti-consumer, instead of anti-developer. It's Tim Sweeney, Mark Zuckerberg, and the ad networks who have the biggest gripe with these policies, not consumers. Consumers are the ones who bear the brunt of the cost when it comes to developers who desperately need to exercise their right to capture every and any piece of data the OS provides.
>If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
>who desperately need to exercise their right to capture every and any piece of data the OS provides.
thankfully the EU has extensive privacy regulations prohibiting developers from doing just that, so we can enjoy open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century
Are those regulations adequately enforced? Lots of smaller developers out of jurisdication, and lots of bigger ones treat it as a cost of doing business: the data is worth more than the fines.
>open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century
But your gripe is not about open platforms. Your gripe is that Apple iOS is not an open platform. Those are two different things, there are open platforms out there.
My complaint is that iOS as a closed platform is a feature, and Apple has been a good steward for that platform that has made it a stable computing platform for the general public. Corporations (cosplaying as "poor indie developers"), are simply frustrated that Apple isn't allowing them to abuse their users for extra dollars.
These same "developers" who pretend to care so deeply about open platforms don't even distribute their software on Linux. The concern trolling about open platforms is a farce. Picking on epic games again - you can't play Fortnite on Linux. It's "open platforms for me, but not for thee"
Forget the advertising angle, lets look at payments. Apple forces you to use their payment processor and they charge a larger fee. What does the consumer get? They get a single control panel for all their subscriptions that they can cancel at any time. "Developers" hate this - not because they want to charge you less, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.
If I have to choose between two evil corporations, Apple and the greater tech industry that shit on the web, I'm picking Apple. If I care about open platforms, I'll move to an open platform, not lobby the government for Apple to open theirs.
>, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.
again, doesn't apply in the EU. Consumer Rights Directive passed a few years ago stipulates that any subscription must be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up, and created a 'two click rule'.
Practical example of this is Amazon, here in the EU it takes exactly two clicks, in a lot of other jurisdictions you have to jump through half a dozen pages.
You might have to choose between two evil corporations, my point was I don't. Here we can open Apple up so they don't get to extract platform rent and I'm still not at the mercy of Tim Sweeney. Being governed by robber barons instead of your own government is an ideological choice, if you enjoy living like that fine but we don't.
A closed platform can only ever be a feature if you're so disempowered that private companies are running circles around you, otherwise it's just anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.
We can? Last time I checked everyone and their mother is collecting all kinds of data for nefarious purposes. EU has a snowball's chance in hell keeping up, and when they eventually get around to issuing a fine it's so small and irrelevant compared to money made that it's business as usual.
Anti-developer is anti-consumer because it creates a barrier to entry as a supplier in a market where consumers create the demand, but I suppose the main thesis behind calling it anti-consumer is that competition among suppliers is generally considered good for consumers for keeping prices and product/service quality in check.
> We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
Evil developers forcing poor users to download their applications.
Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets, because granny gran installed hax to get free gems for a gacha (that she downloaded from Apple approved App Store).
>Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets
Complete non-sequitur. You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.
This is concern trolling. If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about - you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
> You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.
Because the only difference between Apple and Android crap is only software, of course? I won't fit into the message limit if I start listing issues that I have with Android garbage.
> If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about
Where did I say anything about open platform? Are you hallucinating LLM or something? I just want to install whatever I write for myself without going through the hoops of weekly resigning and big brother approving what I do on a device that I OWN.
> you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
> We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
What are you talking about exactly?
On linux I can run any software I want, and how is that bad?
Your approach is fine, if that is something important to use then use linux. What I dislike is taking a platform where the sandbox is a feature, and crying you aren't allowed to shit in the sandbox.
Thank you. There is a huge difference between "developers being able to do anything they want to the user's system" and "users being able to do anything they want with their own system." I'm strongly against the former and strongly for the latter.
App developers have shown time and time again that they will abuse every single resource on the user's system they can get their claws into. If they can get it, they will use APIs meant for accessibility and disabled users to remote-control your system. If they can get it, they will use location/GPS when their app has nothing to do with location. If they can get it, they will spam you with notifications and alerts. The USER needs to have control over these and the ability to stop abusive developers from running roughshod over their computers.
There is a big difference between fighting to keep their walled garden in IOS alive and nuking the entire developer ecosystem that they have built on macos.
Strictly speaking, you can. Enable developer mode, connect your phone to your Mac (you need a Mac), and you can build and install whatever code you want.
Asterisks being that your phone will uninstall it after a while I think, and you need to create a free account for Xcode.
The up to 3 apps per device stay but cannot be opened after 7 days until refreshed.
And "whatever code you want" here excludes JIT compilation, or as I understand it memory that is both writable and executable, as your app would require a special 'entitlement' from Apple.
Seriously? I have a custom Android app that I use. It's mostly vibe coded now, which I'm a bit embarrassed about, but demonstrates that the bar for custom software is very low at the moment and getting lower.
I considered getting an iPhone to replace my S-series Samsung, the only reason I stayed with Samsung is for the S-Pen. Had I gone with iPhone I would not be able to write and run my own software? That's absolutely ridiculous.
> All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
Don’t worry. They’re working really hard to fix the bug. It’s not intended that you can install without paying a fee.
> If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
I just bought a new m5 macbook air. The day that I can't treat my MacOS laptop as basically a glorified NeXT workstation and install/run code of my own choice (albeit after going through a few scary warnings in the default user protecting system preferences, like allow to run unsigned code, etc), is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again.
I see news about apple thinking about "merging" MacOS and iOS and making a touch screen macbook and it really makes me think they are going to try to do this in the near future.
First, Gatekeeper was introduced, but you could globally set in system preferences if unsigned software is enabled. Then this setting option was removed. What will come next? I do not know but I started to migrate off the ecosystem. Just in case.
> is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again.
Kinda tempted to do that already just because of Liquid Glass.
I mean, if I'm going to be stuck with a *nix OS whose UI is badly thought out and inconsistent between apps, might as well take the cheaper option, right?
For desktop and server, sure. MacBook is superior for everything that matters in a laptop. The touchpad alone is a dream. compare that to constant pain for the thousands of hours I will use the device over it's lifetime.
How is that touchpad better than any other? My wife has Macbook Air, I don't see any difference between touchpad on my linux Dell 5680 compared to the Macbook.
It sounds similar to people that praise "haptic feedback" on phones, and describe feedback on some devices as extraordinary. (vibration device, seriously?)
Macbook has nice hardware, if I can ignore the strange keyboard layout, although I would prefer bigger keyboard and smaller touchpad.
Macbook software is something that is so bad compared to linux that I won't even comment.
Glad to see I am not the only one. Many years ago I had a laptop with a pointing stick, aka "the clit", and that was surprisingly easy to use. But touchpads? No matter how fancy and expensive you make them, they will always be a bad interface.
Haptic feedback touchpad is vastly superior to the button style. Less force required makes it easier to move your finger while the "button" is pressed. Most higher end laptops use it as the standard touchpad these days. MacOS is also well optimized for touchpads to the point that the traditional mouse experience is somewhat degraded. The smoothness and interactivity of the animations in response to touchpad gestures give a powerful placebo effect for how good the hardware is.
Multiple other competitive laptops have haptic trackpads with the list growing every year.
Lenovo and Framework have great ones, so does Microsoft and other brands I can’t think of right now.
I also find it that “macOS is well-optimized for touchpads” actually means “macOS is hostile to traditional mice and keyboards so that Apple can sell you external mice that cost 3x the price of alternatives even though you’re using your laptop at a stationary desk with external monitor 80% of the time”.
Plug in a traditional mouse to macOS and you’ll see how horrible the OS is with it for no reason. I needed third party mouse software just to play Minecraft without a horrendous scroll wheel experience for the item bar. There’s no built-in OS setting to have separate scroll directions for trackpad versus external mouse even though such a setup is highly logical. You need third party software for that. Meanwhile, on Linux that configuration option is built-in to Gnome and KDE.
Most trackpad gestures in macOS don’t need to be trackpad gestures at all and seem to be aimed at selling expensive peripherals and making Apple’s trackpad advantage larger than it would be if their system used a different OS. There’s no advantage to three finger swiping versus a traditional keyboard shortcut (to be fair, macOS also offers the keyboard shortcuts).
With the exception of flying on an airplane, grabbing a $30 mouse out of your backpack and plopping it on the table is perfectly acceptable and portable solution and often better than any trackpad imaginable for deep productive work.
Anyway, that last bit is a tangent and a rant of mine, but either way, the list of reasons to prefer a Mac is shrinking every day, if you ask me.
For example, MacBook Pros aren’t at the top of the battery life charts anymore, that honor goes to the Framework 13 Pro with the Panther Lake chips.
Unfortunately, not to my knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a retail partner soon, though.
I own the original chassis 13, AMD 7640U. My previous laptop was a MacBook Pro M2 14”.
There are some clear downgrades: battery life, screen, speakers. Processing power, yeah, though it’s not like I ever maxed out the one I had.
I love having ample storage though. 2TB/32GN in a MacBook Pro was wildly out of my price range. Back in the good old days of early 2025 buying those components yourself was something like a $200-300 cost while the Mac was closer to a thousand bucks. The keyboard is superior to a MacBook Pro in my eyes. I also started to really, really despise the notch and the way the menu bar software fights it.
My Framework 13 Pro arrives tomorrow. It appears like it should address every complaint I have on my original 13”. It’s just too bad about the RAM situation otherwise LPCAMM2 would be a benefit rather than something of a detractor like it is today. You’re almost better off with soldered memory in the current situation, but hopefully that’s temporary.
It’s a dream with Linux compatibility, as you’d expect. I enjoy the fact that I can play real games on Steam compared to the macOS situation where gaming was always a pain. There are also a lot of things I like about CachyOS and KDE a lot better than macOS. In a lot of ways it’s freeing, but some commercial software is obviously missing.
Apple makes nice hardware, but it's definitely not superior for everything, and the gap between other manufacturers isn't really there anymore on the upper end.
So sure - the Macbook is better than a cheap ~$500 laptop. But between my work issued Macbook and my nice Dell XPS? Not much difference. In either price or hardware...
Honestly, even between the macbook and my framework - not enough of a difference to really be that upset about (my biggest complaint is mostly just battery life).
---
Personally, I would argue that OS is a much bigger pain point to deal with, and you should probably factor that higher in the decision than the hardware. Just expect to spend roughly the same on the machine (Apple is still ~20% more)
And none of these are meaningfully different on high end laptops from other providers.
Apple had a window with M1 devices where I'd probably agree they were just better. Apple also has a history of making devices that are very expensive, and have a corresponding higher quality (ex - in the 2000s when most laptop manufacturers were racing to the bottom, and things like the Eee pc were considered hot - lots of garbage quality windows machines).
But many manufacturers today have entries in the "High quality, high price" category, and they're very similar.
The size is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the battery life is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the touchpad is almost identical to an M5 laptop (personally, I actually like the touchpad on the xps slightly more because the cutout on the front of macbooks is sharp, and I find it annoying and painful for long use, but I also have very large hands and I'm left handed).
And also - the price is functionally the same as the new M5 laptops.
All of those land in the +/- 10% range of each other. With just slight differences (ex - I can get a touchscreen on the XPS if I want, but it makes the battery life 15hrs instead of 18hrs on the macbook. The XPS is also fractionally lighter (3lbs vs 3.4lbs). The macbook is ~10% faster on single core benchmarks then the intel series 3, but identical to slightly worse on multicore. etc...)
Basically - unless you're actually using different machines here... stop it, you're talking out your ass (cough - fanboy - cough).
Even the framework... yes - it's clearly not as "good" as the $3600 macbook I have. I don't expect it to be given I paid ~$1500 for it. But it also excels in other areas that make it worth considering - I have 3 young kids, and I've had the screen pulled flat several times, the touchpad got a cup of milk dumped in it, and my oldest shoved a screwdriver into a usb-c port. Turns out new screen hinges were ~$19, the touchpad was ~$21, and the replacement port was $9. All done at home myself with simple tools.
Compared to several trips to a store and weeks without a laptop... that's a type of ergonomics that I prefer right now.
Eh, it depends on how you use it. I have a heavily used Linux laptop that's almost a decade old and I still love it.
I've had various work and personal MacBooks over the years and don't really miss them. It sounds like their quality has gotten somewhat better in recent cycles but the era of keyboards so fragile they break if you sneeze on them, and gimmicks like turning part of the keyboard into a touch screen were terrible. I would absolutely take a Linux machine from that era that costs half as much over any of those devices.
One caveat is that there are Apple-specific features like some of the trackpad gestures that I've never been a heavy user of. Partly because they aren't that interesting to me, and partly because I don't like having my workflows and muscle memory tied to a specific platform I don't control. Someone heavily into those features might have a harder time switching away.
The "merging" is the "convergence" meme. Tech journos like it because they can say "the coming unification" and it has a kind of mythic taste and they're casual thinkers. If (when?) Apple goes down that path, their entire value prop will be dead and gone. The Linux Desktop will come as everything else simply decays.
> "is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again."
I bought a Linux laptop 1 or 2 years ago (after many years of using Macbooks), and was very surprised how well Linux works nowadays.
As a matter of fact, in many areas Linux is even better than macOS. There's so many annoying bugs in macOS that interrupt your workflow on a daily basis.
So, my Linux laptop is a lot more stable too.
Would definitely recommend giving Linux a try
(Unless maybe if you have very little "tech" knowledge. I would not recommend it to everyone and their grandmother just yet, since they probably aren't aware of the consequences and howto migrate things.)
It's not that I haven't given it a try, my primary desktop machine is debian stable and xfce4 with the libraries installed to also run a bunch of gnome and kde-native applications, but that right now I prefer macos for laptop use... Primarily due to suspend/resume working properly, the touchpad, and certain user interface things in MacOS that make working with a single smaller screen easier for extensive multitasking (expose hot corners of screen to quickly see all windows, switch windows, etc).
I use Asahi Linux as my M2 work laptop on a daily basis. Other than the lack of USB external display support, which I don't use, and sleep eating up about 1% of battery per hour it works incredibly well. I have an 13th gen Intel laptop that I got last year and Asahi just runs circles around it on Linux with just about everything.
I haven't had any suspend/resume issues for years on laptops with Linux. I've used multiple ThinkPads and Dell XPS machines. Currently rocking an ancient MacBook air from 2014 running Ubuntu which also doesn't have any issues.
There was a time I was worried about them doing this (during the touchbar Macbook era) but I think the Mac is once again viewed by Apple as extremely important. I think it's more likely we see a split of the iPad line in the next few years - Pros run macOS, whereas the base iPad, iPad Mini, and iPad Air continue to run iOS which is being modified for larger screens of foldables anyway. iPadOS goes away
Apple is the worst about this. "It works on my computer" but it won't on your computer, because Apple will quarantine my code when it gets copied to your computer, so it can't run on your computer because it's "damaged". Unless I pay Apple $100/yr. Microsoft is worse these days, but that's no excuse.
There is no actual "news" about that, because it is, and always has been, bullshit.
People talk about it every time Apple releases a new major OS update with UI changes that make macOS and iOS look similar, or a new laptop form factor, because it gets clicks. It's basically the new "Apple is Doomed!" (Which, in case you weren't paying attention to the tech press pre-2010, was the perennial narrative around them—and yes, it did take years after the runaway success of the iPhone for the stories to stop.)
> The curated experience on iOS is a feature, not a bug.
Which experience do you mean? The crApp Store full of obvious scams? The abuse of the built-in push notifications and apps to advertise Apple "services" on every device? I mean, how many damn times do I have to say no to Apple Arcade or iCloud+?
These aren't problems I face often. I especially don't get random push notifications about Apple (or any other) services, so I'm not sure what's going on for you.
Apple's internal justification for this is that the iPhone and iPad are consumer devices designed for maximum comfort and safety, whereas the Mac is a device designed for developers and professionals. From their perspective there's legitimate demand for both, and they serve both market needs.
BTW you can't download and run arbitrary code on your Mac unless you break out a terminal and do developer-y things, because notarization has been a requirement on macOS for years. There is no clicking through scary warnings. macOS will simply tell you that an unnotarized app is broken and refuse to open it via any GUI path that exists. You'll have to strip the quarantine xattrs at the UNIX level to bypass it.
> Apple's internal justification for this is that the iPhone and iPad are consumer devices designed for maximum comfort and safety, whereas the Mac is a device designed for developers and professionals.
Then why did they recently launch a MacBook that costs less than an iPhone and a marketing campaign targeted at existing iPhone users?
Actually, it is just apple started with app store/closed with the iphone, and got away with it.
for the mac - I don't think they could close the platform.
What I think they could do is make the ipad more appealing, add a keyboard, then kill the mac like they killed the mac pro. (fire your low-value customers)
I'm honestly baffled as to how EU regulators can see Apple's behavior as compliance. They're doing everything they did before, perhaps changing only to temporarily turn down the intensity a bit.
> A person downloads the program directly onto their computer
> A person makes a purchase for services within my app on their computer
> Somehow Apple gets 5% of the proceeds, despite being entirely uninvolved except for the initial sale of goods
An analogous situation would be Mercedes-Benz demanding 5% of every ride booked in a taxi they manufactured, for the reason that they have to continue to make and sell parts for the vehicle, and everyone (including the EU) somehow being A-OK with it.
And I’m fine with that. Owned 6 iphones, bought another one but fuckers keep complaining instead of voting with their wallet. They want a cookie, eat a cookie, and the EU just keeps degrading my trust to the company because fuckers don’t practice what they preach: go snd vote with your wallet.
I buy s Mercedes Benz. I want a warranty. I am forced to use an authorised service provider who’s expensive af and I risk losing the warranty otherwise. How is that not anticonsumer? I crash said car, the insurer will not insure my car until it’s fixed by an authorised technician. How is that not anticonsumer.
The person who pays for the computer pays for the development software by virtue of the significant price uplift on Apple hardware relative to a similar configuration of non-Apple hardware.
Agreed. The muggings Apple's now doing in Europe under their new "gentler muggings" policies are noticeably less brutal than the "traditional muggings" they still do over here.
What I've always found strange about this saga is that Apple's argument has been "we need to be reimbursed for our investments in R&D and maintenance of the App Store". I don't disagree, that seems fair. But they already DO charge explicitly for this... it's the developer program fee. Is this not the exact mechanism they should be using? As far as I can tell the court case didn't broach this.
Imagine if Apple and Google and etc, didn't vendor lock-in.
Imagine we could run what we wanted. Imagine that we could use whatever payment system we wanted.
Imagine if apple wanted you to use Apple app X, it would need to compete and make it amazing, not just lock you in. Same with payment systems.
Imagine if you could replace the battery of your old phone, and use it for as long as you wished. Without Apple forcing upgrades through their usual tactics.
Apple tells me that it won't even accept applications that target pre-13 soon. And then pre-15 next year.
I hate them.
The fact that this is our current state of tech, tells me that all of the politicians are bought, and that the tech sector has rotten.
And the cost of the device sold to end users. And possibly other service fees such as iCloud subscriptions. These are avenues for Apple to earn money to invest in R&D.
And they act like there's no motivation for R&D unless they're making this rent. I'd say if the R&D makes their devices better then they'll sell more of them and gain marketshare. They don't need the rents to justify that.
Better business for a specific company doesn't mean better markets for consumers and other participants, and we make laws to ensure the latter even if it's at the expense of the former.
Google is also listening though. They are slowly introducing similar restrictions after seeing what absurdity Apple gets away with as "compliance" of needing to also allow anyone to offer software for iOS. Our mistake is thinking it's fine that apple believers get vendor lock-in because there is still Google and Android lets you run whatever code you want. Yeah, until it doesn't
Why do you want huge companies to be allowed so much control?
What is it about letting them restrict what people can do in order to squeeze even more money out of them and other companies that appeals to you so much?
Where do you think this should stop?
Should my wifi router be allowed to only work with some brands of phone or laptop?
Should my mobile service provider be allowed to ask for a percentage of any payment I use over their connection?
Should my car by allowed to refuse to park if the owner of the car park doesn't share ticket revenue with its manufacturer?
If not, why not?
Personally, I choose to believe that just like some things cannot legally be agreed to contractually (even if they're in the contract and you sign it), some business models should also be unacceptable to society. That includes any situation where by owning a platform, media property, or content/service delivery technology or provider, a company wants to force itself as a middleman between any two parties.
I think the point is that they didn't charge developers anything specifically to be developers or sell apps. They just needed the same hardware and software as everybody else, which, yes, they probably had to buy.
No customer would buy Apple's products, which they sell with large profit margins, if Apple would not invest in its operating system and maintain a way for developers to distribute apps.
Therefore I would challenge the idea that it is fair for developers to pay Apple a 15/26% commission for the privilege of distributing apps.
If developers were one single business that Apple has to deal with to get third party apps made for their phone, they would be paying us a commission instead of the other way around.
They use technical means to create lock-in that prevents me from NOT using these services.
Apple actively prevents users from installing any other OS on an iPhone. Apple actively prevents uses from finding and installing apps through other means.
I'd be okay paying App Store fees when I had a choice, and decided that it's the best source of apps, worth the cost. But because I'm forced to pay for a service I didn't ask for, fuck Apple.
(and the mobile duopoly, ecosystem lock-ins, and barriers to entry mean I can't really refuse this shit, I can only choose one of two flavors of this shit).
>Unified Business Terms for Developers That Distribute Apps in the EU
Under this new model, Apple will charge a commission on the sale of digital goods and services. The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee.
Imagine if every purchase of an application on Windows had to pay a 5% EU allowed Microsoft Monopoly tax.
Is Apple still able to apply this to digital stores too, like Kindle ebooks, or has that at least been fixed? Because, again, imagine if Microsoft also required you to pay a 5% tax on every purchase made on Windows.
It's just crazy that the EU literally worked with Apple to allow this.
> Beginning October 1, 2026, reader apps distributed in the EU may promote out-of-app offers for digital goods and services without an actionable link [...]
So you can now at least promote your offers, which was forbidden previously.
A reader app is, in Apples words: "With reader apps, people can sign in to their account created outside the app, letting them view and enjoy previously purchased media content or content subscriptions on their Apple device."
>For App Store apps that link out of the app to complete purchases, the commission will be 15 percent. Developers in the programs mentioned above will pay a reduced rate of 10 percent.
This is one of the most 'evil' policies I've simply ever heard of. I know today it's not even allowed to mention it, but it seems like the most slam dunk monopoly abuse possible. The damage to customers is clear, a company could charge 15% less and receive the same amount if they were simply 'allowed' to tell customers to go to their site. Somehow Fortnite did exactly this, got banned for it, and it still wasn't enough to put an end to it.
The ONLY interesting market share here isn't how many apps Apple create, or how large share of the smartphones they have. It's how much of the distribution of apps they control on iOS (which easily reaches the bar of being a market in itself).
I.e. the monopoly question is: if apple takes X% for each app in this market, and a competitor can't take less, then it's a monopoly.
My local Walmart has shelves dedicated to selling the products of other companies, and yet I can't just waltz in and set up my own stand in the middle of a Walmart. Walmart is monopolizing Walmart store space! Well, yes, of course it is. Walmart store space is not a market. Something like business real estate might be, but Walmart is not monopolizing that.
Apple is like 20% of the phone market. There is no market in which Apple is a dominant monopoly.
> In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises.[3] Although monopolies may be big businesses, size is not a characteristic of a monopoly. A small business may still have the power to raise prices in a small industry (or market).[3]
All countries with a working democracy would class Apple as a monopoly as it has significant market power, enough to distort prices.
A market is the set of things which are fungible substitutes for each other. Essentially every brand of gasoline is in the same market. By contrast, gasoline and diesel are separate markets, because some vehicles require gasoline and can't use diesel and others the other way around. They're not substitutes when your vehicle can only use one of them and you can't get out of it by trying to claim that the market is all types of fuel.
Now suppose you have an iPhone and want to download an app, or want to distribute your app to customers many of which have an iPhone. What substitute for Apple's store is available to do that?
I don't understand what makes people think Sony should get a pass here either. If you buy a PlayStation and want to install Blender on it and use it for 3D modeling then what business is that of Sony's?
More specifically your question is like asking what if you have a car that requires diesel, what substitute is available to let you use cheaper gasoline?
I must have missed when I could install Android apps on iOS (if Apple actually allowed users to install their own software there's a 99% chance this would exist by now funnily enough).
Yea defining the market is 95% of anti trust cases. But asking yourself 'if Microsoft did what Apple is doing' should be enough to show at some point, it is a market.
> More specifically your question is like asking what if you have a car that requires diesel, what substitute is available to let you use cheaper gasoline?
It's like asking what the available substitute is for diesel fuel from Shell, to which the answer is diesel fuel from Chevron, BP, Sunoco, etc.
So now what are the available substitutes for distributing apps to devices that require iOS apps and can't run Android apps?
EU law doesn't actually require a monopoly for competition rules to apply, it's a "dominant position". Apple certainly meets that definition for smartphone platforms.
Sure, but ApolloFortyNine described Apple’s behavior as “slam dunk monopoly abuse”. A monopoly is not a dominant position, it’s an overwhelmingly dominant one.
If you want to distribute mobile apps and reach all users - something that is required for any kind or collaborative app - you MUST support iPhone in the western world. In fact, it’s often iPhone first, Android second.
And on the iPhone, you MUST use the Apple App Store, not just as a means to distribute your app, but as your payment provider. You can’t collect payment details yourself, use Stripe, Paddle, anything. You MUST use Apple.
You simply cannot enter business without paying Apple a share. That’s a monopoly.
I just don’t get the outrage. If you made HATS and wanted to sell them at STORE, do you think you get to just walk into STORE and tell the manager/owner:
1) find some space on the shelf and your stock room to put my stuff!
2) I don’t have a store with shelves or visiting customers, but you will sell this for me at 0% profit!
You’re paying for sales access to millions of devices with frictionless checkout.
And you want to… make it harder to check out? Because you think you’re entitled sell things to their user base?
You're forgetting some detail in your example, which is that
1. the existing STORES also sell almost all the CARS, and the GPS in these cars is hardcoded to only drive to one of their STORES
2. The government is considering a law that forces everyone to show their ID to open the door and drive their CAR,
3. To enfore #2, the government is considering a law to prevent drivers from manually entering GPS coordinates to any other stores, because the two existing STORES promise to enforce the ID-verification system in their parking lots.
Now you want to sell your HAT, good luck, because anybody trying to open up a Hat-Droid store with your product in it, is soon legally prevented from doing so. For security purposes. Think of the children!
I think the fundamental thing here is that this isn't merely a store. The Apple ecosystem is large enough to BE a market in itself.
It's not about the market for apps, or the market for smartphones. Those markets are comparable to any market.
This is about the market for apps ON the apple ecosystem. And the problem that is being solved is: Apple can't have a monopoly on that market, such that they can (for example) charge a commission for every sale.
Basically: we can't allow a company to be so successful that their STORE becomes a MARKET.
You’re making a lot of statements here with no supporting argument.
Plenty of other companies manufacture hardware and run stores. If we’re going to say that isn’t allowed, then at least make the rule across the board.
How many new companies will be popping up to manufacture these types of devices? Not many.
I think the reality is that the EU sees an opportunity to apply some pressure on a few successful foreign companies, as that potentially provides them leverage in other negotiations, or at the very least some revenue from fines.
> Plenty of other companies manufacture hardware and run stores.
How does that matter? Are you suggesting we must treat a massive company the same as a not-massive company?
Once they reach a certain size, they're at risk of being a monopoly. Until they do, they're not. This is just a matter of size.
Well I’m definitely going to suggest that you don’t understand the definition of the word monopoly, because it has nothing to do with “size”.
What I’m suggesting is that it’s at best sloppy, and at worst corrupt, to arbitrarily apply rules in the way the EU is doing. If you think it’s wrong for a hardware manufacturer to be the sole operator of an app or software store on their platform, that’s fine. Make your rule, apply it to everyone, and give people N years to come into compliance.
The reason the EU isn’t doing that in these cases is because they don’t want to apply these laws to EU companies, and it gives them leverage in negotiations with foreign companies.
If you made HATS and sold them at a STORE (is the all caps thing legalese or why do we talk this this?), and the owner of the BIG STORE walked into your STORE and told you:
"Nice STORE you have there! Would be a shame if something happened to all those HATS of yours. Pay us a five percent commission, otherwise your HATS will stop working."
We have a word for those situations, and any democratic society would discourage that type of entrepreneurship long before it came to that. It's just that we should have done something long before our pensions were dependent on these companies which are now too big to fail.
But of course you have a store. That's the whole point and that's what you analogy missed. The point was to be able to sell services outside the Apple store, in anotherstore.
You're creating strawmen here, but it's funny you mention Epic since, yes, they were more than willing to do that, and they have done that. As soon as they were allowed to do so.
Of course Apple will close the Store and make apps impossible if they could not extract their fee. That was the plan with the original iPhone and HTML only web apps in its browser. Then they got a more profitable idea.
For the apps to go away the store for free must be imposed on Apple, Google and everybody else but I don't think it will ever happen. If it will, people will use the browser and that would be enough. Some JS APIs will be dismissed, some hardware will be removed, some functionality will become impossible and slowly forgotten. Nobody will cry too much and business and entertainment as usual.
Unfortunately xcode and app distribution is mandated by apple. Using cryptographic keys they stand in the way of "owners" of phones from loading non-apple-approved software.
even the name "sideloading" has come into being. When the PC first came out it was just "running".
Apple should develop and distribute an SDK with an IDE because an iPhone with no apps and no games is worth a lot less to consumers. Microsoft knows this well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
And the "distribute" part is a self-imposed limitation by Apple. Developers would be happy to host their own ipa files.
Apple just can't read the room can they? For a while I agreed with their stance to not allow web payments for things like IAP but as time has gone on the stance has become less and less defensible and tipped over in the absurd.
I'll state plainly: Apple should get 0% of the non-Apple-processed payments.
- You link out (or even payments in-app not through Apple): Apple gets 0%
- You aren't in the app store: Apple gets 0%
They should have to actually compete, do things like allow developers to give refunds, allow different monetization strategies (upgrade pricing?), make App Store Connect _not_ a steaming pile of shit.
The rent-seeking has got to stop.
Apple makes money on the hardware, Apple makes money off developers, Apple makes money off ads, Apple makes plenty of money. Taxing every financial activity (expect for the growing list of carve-outs which look sillier and sillier as time goes on) is beyond the pale.
I will say that I think the 30% deal was a good deal when the App Store launched but times have changed, taking payments online has gotten easier, hosting something like the App Store has gotten cheaper, and the App Store does not provide enough value to deserve so rich a cut.
The crap apps that sail by review while legitimately good and well-crafted Apps get held up is but one example. If App Review was faster and/or better we might be having a different conversation but Apple has not upheld its end of the bargain and has the audacity to still think they deserve a huge cut.
There are whole categories of apps I wish I had on my iPhone that will never see the light of day because of Apple's policies and/or they are DOA because Apple wants 30% [0].
If macOS launched today I probably wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole because of how locked down it would be. Even now we have to fight to run the software we want unless it's signed. How Apple doesn't see that they are killing the golden goose is beyond me. There is plenty of money for them to make and the only way Apple can continue to squeeze is due to anti-competitive practices which harm all consumers.
I still think the DMA was ham-fisted and written by complete morons but it was a step in the right direction. It's too bad our "elected" officials are bought and paid for and too busy engaging in one-upmanship or cheap shots to do anything close to actually governing.
Lastly, I continue to find it disgusting and immoral how much money Apple makes off incredibly unsavory practices like the casinos for children (and adults) they promote and encourage (gems, coins, tokens, loot boxes, and the list goes on). Our corrupt politicians are complicit in abdicating any responsibility for the cesspool which is 99% of IAP.
[0] Yes, I know it's 15% for small business but while they tout that regularly it's not so black and white. There are cliffs, it's not progressive, and you have to apply for it. 1 good year can screw you over and using just revenue as the marker is wrong IMHO.
> For users under 13 years old, apps from the App Store cannot link out to websites for transactions to protect against the risk of scams that target younger kids.
Lol - I've been using the phrase "casino games for children" to describe Apple's primary App Store cash cow since I first heard someone use it since it describes the genre so well. And I just realized this latest policy is them saying "Nobody exploits children with casino games but us!"
I don't think this is accurate at all. While we're part of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, it does not give an OS owner a general right to charge a commission on third-party software merely because it runs on that OS. [I challenge you to cite the section in the Treaty which gives Apple the ability to charge these fees in contravention of EU law.](https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/text/295166)
Installing software on a normal computer has always been a straightforward process and nobody has claimed any IP rights on the process.
Installing software on the iPhone is not at all straightforward. It requires interacting with proprietary Apple software and rights management interfaces. Had the DMA been written 20 years ago, it is possible that they could have prevented Apple from implementing things this way. But they didn’t. It’s too late.
Anyway, once you understand how software is installed on an iPhone, you can plainly see how nearly all of WIPO applies.
This is a loss if the EU actually considers this acceptable. I should be able to Just™ install an app from whereever, and Apple shouldn't have a say in that. Notarization isn't needed on PCs or Macs, and yet here we are.
Macs are model of PCs of a specific brand that closes their PCs down. Continuing to treat Macs as different from other PCs is exactly what lifts scrutiny if they decide to implement notarisation on MacOS. "After all, it's not like it's a PC."
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 11.2 ms ] threadTurnis taking the reins perhaps?
This has clearly been tilting at windmills this entire time. They were never going to win. How much time and money could they have saved by giving a reasonable amount instead of sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling “la la la I can’t hear you why do you love criminals”?
I definitely recall previous iterations where Apple announced changes to comply with legal requirements where the authorities ended up saying "this absolutely doesn't resolve the issue".
This is quite a big change for EU users. What I don't understand is how Apple will track the new 5% commission for web distributed apps. You do need to register for the programme, so maybe that is one way they track businesses and get a right to audit their books.
My understanding is that it's based entirely on self-reporting by developers.
> Companies will now qualify if they:
> * Meet a moderate financial-stability bar as scored by Dun & Bradstreet. > * Are publicly traded or owned by a publicly traded company. > * Have received venture funding from an established investment firm. > * Have completed a financial audit by a licensed accountant. > * Are a government entity, educational institution, or nonprofit.
Independent web distribution of an app requires only notarization.
My guess: since all apps will need to be notarized, even web distributed ones, your phone will phone home to Apple servers when you first launch it (and periodically afterwards), to verify it isn’t in a revocation list. That will allow Apple to track unique installs and then bill the Apple developer account based on pricing data reported by the web distributor as part of their separate agreement with Apple.
Apple and EU keep the power to ban your app if it goes against "European" values.
What the fuck. Does this also include apps that keep purchase management entirely out of the app? And if so, is that even legal?
Hope I'm misreading this...
All of it's purely arbitrary and based on whatever the max Apple thinks they can skim from every transaction based on what leverage they have. The App Store has corrupted Apple into a form I don't even recognize anymore.
[...]
> "The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee."
[...]
> "In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats."
This is bonkers, I can't believe the EU Commission agreed to it. The main issue that the DMA was about still remains: Apple retains ultimate control over app developers' dealings with users.
The status quo that the EU should have pushed for, and which Article 6(7) of the DMA requires, is one where a developer can distribute iOS apps to users without ever entering into any contractual relationship with Apple. The OS APIs that most apps use are already paid-for by the user when they buy the device. Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia already in them.
Of course, Xcode and the SDK overall aren't paid for by users, so Apple can charge devs for it, but so far there's no way to signal to Apple that you have opted out of using their SDK and have the fee waived. Not that it would be enough anyway, since even having to interact with Apple in any capacity to be an iOS dev is the main problem.
Android is moving to the same, KYC (credit or debit card; no prepaid cards) with play store required for APK distribution
Which censorship do you consider problematic?
The only change made that's relevant to sideloading-a-downloaded-APK as far I understand, is a 24hour delay in enabling the ability to do so, which is a wildly overblown non-issue.
Availability is a key component of security, and this is a 24-hour DOS on apps not blessed by google.
It will likely be delayed, just like Manifest v3, but eventually it will happen.
The app is still available in Russia on both App Store and Play Store.
[1] https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/company-annou...
How do you not use their SDK?
Basically enough to render inputs to a gpu accelerated surface.
And I'd argue that this is a core OS feature that you expect on any modern OS.
I doubt Apple can even ship a mobile phone without audio or I/O support even without third party apps...
The first third party iPhone apps existed before the SDK existed. iPhone OS was jailbroken pretty quickly and apps emerged fast. SDKs are nice references and tools but the're not the only way to skin a cat.
That argument would assume no cost for upgrades.
I remember having to buy new operating systems.
That said, looking at the state of recent OS upgrades, I think I'd have been happy if the only changes over the last, oh, decade or so, had been purely security updates. But these too are not free.
> Apple wants to double-dip and charge developers for the value that the users already have by virtue of owning their iDevices with all the necessary iOS paraphernalia in them.
Yes, obviously they want to make as much money as possible, and this is at odds with consumer interests.
That said, I have the impression that for many users, the benefit is the app ecosystem, while for many developers the benefit is the users. Endless marketing cycles of new-shiny-API for one, and new-shiny-UI for the other.
That said, power-law distribution, so "the app ecosystem" is probably mostly Meta, Google, Amazon, as specific names, then becoming somewhat vague with "whatever work mandated of Slack or MS teams", "their bank", "three or four supermarkets", and "a taxi firm who may or may not be Uber".
It's not at odds with consumer interests at all. It's at odds with developer interests.
It would actually cost consumers more if Apple couldn't make any money from developers directly because they'd try to make it up by charging more for Apple products.
Developers might prefer to shift the burden to consumers's wallets instead of their own, but overall this model is beneficial for everyone involved. It is also better for the environment because directly making money from developers incentivizes them to support old hardware for as long as possible.
I vigorously disagree with this. It sounds very confused about economics, specifically prices.
Apple, as every market actor does, charges the absolute maximum price the market will bear for their products and not a penny less. They cannot "make up" any money that comes from unrelated parties (such as their Google payola for search, or their casino games for children IAP revenue) by raising product prices. If they could raise their product prices and have that be profit-positive, they would have done it yesterday.
They could raise prices on phones to make up for a hypothetical "free iCloud+," because the same consumers are the other party in both those transactions so presumably many people would see that the more expensive phone justifies free iCloud services.
Apple doesn't set its prices by saying "OK, we need exactly 83 billion dollars in net income this year, so given that our products cost us 233 billion dollars to make and we have 54 billion dollars in expenses, we need 383 billion in revenue, so now let's set prices of each product to target this."
That $83 billion in net income is just the number they are able to make last year with the prices being what the market would bear. Trying to increase prices to hold it there when a downfall in other revenue happens would depress sales.
Not entirely how you've made formed this connection but respectively it sounds like you've confused several things here.
> Apple sets prices based on a 30% raw profit margin and ignores the market except as it constrains their raw material and manufacturing costs.
Literally impossible ahead of time, as some of their costs are fixed rather than marginal. If you spend, as they did last year, ~$34.5bn on R&D, and you make a thing that costs $1000 to make and then you price it at $1300, but the market looks at what it is and what it costs and says "nah" so only 1 million people buy it that year, then what you're actually making isn't a 30% profit, it is a loss >110x your revenue.
iPhone sales pay for the entirety of Apple's R&D. 10 times over.
Apple sells 240+ million iPhones a year. Apple's profit margin is an unheard-of 25%.
iPhone customers pay for everything.
If you want to frame it as Apple screwing other big corporations, fine...
Is it alright for Apple to tax direct competitors to their own services, like Netflix and Spotify? And if they don't pay, to ban those competitors from telling their users how to sign up? When Apple's competing alternative is bundled with the device, advertised in the OS, and lets you subscribe in the app?
The total cost of supporting the hardware via the OS is easily baked in to the exorbitant hardware cost, or failing that, could easily be baked in.
And you can tell this is the case because they do eventually drop support for old phones. Its not like they give you forever security updates because you buy apps.
> [“The Commission welcomes the changes made by Apple to its commercial terms,” commented a spokesperson for the European Commission. This announcement, the spokesperson continues, is “the result of close dialogue between the Commission and Apple,” after the tech giant was found in April 2025 to have breached the rules of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and ordered to take the necessary corrective measures. In light of these developments and the changes to be introduced, “the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new conditions.”](https://www.eunews.it/en/2026/08/18/tracking-and-new-commerc...)
> “Following today’s announcement, the Commission will monitor Apple’s effective implementation of the new terms,” it added.
There's nothing on the commission webpage, all I could find is the above comments from a spokesperson which aren't hugely definitive.
I think we can take the mention of dialogue to mean the commission thinks the new rules are a step forward enough that wider civil society can have a look and maybe kick up a stink, and the absence of press release coordinated with Apple as evidence the procedure is still open
The app developers can offer their own line of devices on the market. Users are free to choose a different manufacturer. Apple doesn't hold anybody in chains, it is people and developers who are coming to them.
Or should people to restaurants and demand to be allowed to order food delivery from other places to their tables, and bring their own drinks? Honestly, I think that most hackers and EU bureaucrats think that it would be a splendid idea.
A restaurant is private property, you're just a customer in someone else's turf. An iPhone (and the individual iOS copy inside it that provides the advertised functionality) is the intellectual property of Apple, but also the private property of the user, and it is the traditional property ownership status that determines who gets to interact with the functionality. Apple is unfairly forcing themselves into the dev-user relationship here.
> Apple is unfairly forcing themselves into the dev-user relationship here.
Who was forced to buy an iPhone? Who was forced to develop for Apple devices?
No, because Apple chooses to prevent me from controlling the device the way I want. The skill involved is about finding holes in the system, not in enabling an "expert mode" or something.
The imbalance of power is itself a problem. A hardware manufacturer should be legally prohibited from designing their devices in such a way that they retain more control over them post-sale than the actual owner. Device ownership should mean maximum control over code execution.
> Who was forced to buy an iPhone?
Nobody, but I'm not a free market absolutist.
> Who was forced to develop for Apple devices?
Every developer who wants to cater to ~half of the mobile user population (~85% if it's young Americans)
That's a pretty ridiculous argument if you ask me.
Apple on the other hand offers a locked down product that many people want because they don’t trust themselves. I think a lot of people have short memories for all the hacking and spyware that plagued Windows users a couple decades ago. I think we also need to remember that Apple is not the government so people have alternatives to buying their devices.
Personally, I think people should have the right to buy a locked down device. It’s not on Apple to provide open competitors to their product. And why should developers have a right to develop for the platform? Heck, I wanted the iPhone back when it didn’t even have 3rd party apps at all.
And that still plagues every computing platform now. Including Apple platforms. So the lockdown clearly didn’t completely solve that problem like a lot of people seem to claim
The idea that, for many people purchasing an iPhone, the inability to install apps from alternative stores or the web is a selling point seems rather questionable.
On top of that this could easily be provided by an optional switch that enables you to enforce this on your own device if you so desire.
It is a poor reason to request that all app distribution for everyone else also has to go through Apple and its terms, basically for your convenience.
Ultimately, an option becomes a requirement and then the protection for users is totally gone.
They have no power to prevent you from doing anything you want to your device. Just like Ford has no power to stop me from modifying my truck in any way I want. Or any other product from any other company.
Not helping you is something different, that's not preventing.
> Every developer who wants to cater to ~half of the mobile user population (~85% if it's young Americans)
That's a choice for them to make. You might then say that Coca-Cola is forcing supermarkets to carry their product because customers want to buy them.
They have the technical ability to prevent me from running the code I want, and they exercise that ability for that purpose. They're not a passive actor in this situation, they explicitly block me from doing things that they themselves can do, even after the sale.
Again, this should be a concern merely because of the power imbalance.
> That's a choice for them to make. You might then say that Coca-Cola is forcing supermarkets to carry their product because customers want to buy them.
Not the same thing at all. The mobile app market is a top-level one in a way the Coca-Cola one is not. Apple is controlling a huge amount of commerce for products that have nothing to do with them, besides being digital accessories to iDevices.
The better analogy would be: there are only two store companies in the entire US. If you want to sell any product at all, of any category (silverware, food, lawnmowers etc) you must contract with them and there's no other way, and anyone who wants to purchase any product whatsoever only has those two options.
You are effectively forced to buy either and Android or an iOS phone to participate in society.
Since the market for phone operating systems is not even remotely competitive regulation is necessary just like in all others uncompetitive markets.
And now you are saying that people were forced to purchase iPhones because of Android?
> which unfair market conditions made it impossible
Bank applications depending on various os or device level security features? Good luck getting developers to build applications for your platform in general until you have a very large number of users (even Microsoft couldn’t manage it when the oligopoly was way less entrenched)
Well then you aren't forced to purchase an iPhone, are you? Much less forced to develop for an iPhone. If a developer isn't satisfied with having access to billions of Android customers, then they should change careers or stop complaining.
Developers also had every opportunity in the world to offer their software for Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices. Or offer their own devices with their software. Which is an easy thing for banks to do. Their laziness and incompetence isn't an excuse for them to turn around and point fingers at Apple for being successful. They made their own bed.
The average Android user is almost worthless financially compared to the average iPhone user. If you calculate the market share based on revenue and jot total users Apple has a much bigger proportion of the pie than the raw user base would suggest.
> Which is an easy thing for banks to do.
The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.
Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly, the government’s job is to make sure that markets are competitive.
> around and point fingers at Apple for being successful. They made their own bed.
To get into the position where you can abuse your position in the market you have to do something right, certainly. That doesn’t mean you should be allowed to do that in perpetuity.
But how and why is Apple to be blamed for that?
> The victim in this case are the consumers, not banks.
The culprits are the banks, who aren't offering their customers adequate service. The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.
> Overall the smartphone OS market is a not very competitive oligopoly
Some of the biggest companies in the world are competing against each other on smart phones. And customers have a great variety of devices to choose from. Smart phones is a prime example on where the free market worked: Fierce competition between several very large companies resulted in amazing devices being offered to customers. And since customers are free to choose what they purchase, they will choose the best device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable. Companies who cannot offer good enough products fall away from the competition by the nature of the free market: Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, Siemens, and more. All of them were powerful corporations.
Current hacker ideology has mixed the worst parts of capitalism and communism into weird standpoints which make no sense. Am I supposed to feel sorry that developers (they are mostly giant corporations) can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? And that therefore the government should intervene to guarantee the profits of these giant corporations?
Enough, already. Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition. Let them have their win, and if they are acting against the interest of their consumers, then they won't have their win for long.
It’s not about blame, the point of anti trust and competition laws is just that, maximize competition and consumer surplus. Yes that inherently penalizes the most successful companies we collectively as a society judged that to be a fair bargain.
> The culprit certainly isn't Apple. They aren't a bank.
Sure, it’s easier to go after Apple not banks, though.
> have a great variety of devices to choose from
Physical hardware sure. Effectively there is no choice when it comes to software though.
> device they can get at whatever price they deem reasonable and affordable
Sure, but again physical hardware is not whats being discussed here. All major device manufacturers make it either were hard or impossible to install alternative operating systems (especially that got much worse for Android devices over the years).
> can't figure out how to make money without depending on Apple? A
When it comes to certain sectors that’s true. Or rather you are supposed to pay a very significant proportion of your revenue as rent to Apple to for very little in return (Apple benefits almost as much from third party developers as developers do from Apple).
> Apple has no unfair advantage against the competition, except for the incompetence of said competition
Yeah, that how most monopolies work. They are just outright better than their competition until they are in a dominant position and can get a higher proportion of the pie because they ran all the competitors out of business. That’s exactly when regulators should intervene to make the market more efficient.
Based on empirical evidence free/efficient markets can almost never exist without regulation.
> Users are free to choose a different manufacturer
It’s an oligopoly, so no, consumers are not exactly free to do what they want. If the market were truly competitive you might have a point.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and now they've attained it, they won't give it up voluntarily. You have to force them.
So that means Fortnite can't link out, right? Or does this mean because it's being delivered by the Epic Games Store, they can bypass that rule?
this seems to imply the Commission signed off on this. I really can't imagine that this changes anything meaningfully wrt to the DMA?
I am really hoping this isn’t the end of it, general purpose computing devices need to allow its user to choose the security model, in my opinion the entire industry fundamentally depends on it, and without that freedom we will have monopolies deciding everything sooner or later.
The closed model has been very good for both developers and consumers. If we use Android as a counterfactual to iOS there are entire swaths of apps that are available on one that are not on the other. Android is more amenable to open source apps and whatever Apple doesn’t on its store. But it is also easier to pirate and download cracked software.
My own interest in making music exposed me to a stark difference between Android and iOS. There is an enormous number of audio apps available on iOS that simply don’t exist in Android. There are a fair number of apps that mirror windows and Mac apps but are far far cheaper on iOS. I am convinced that the console approach to iOS apps is responsible for the existence of a lot of apps that wouldn’t be offered otherwise.
We are better off with a mix of platform types. I can’t imagine any real way a development machine could be completely locked down. They have to be able to run arbitrary code.
See? “Development machine” just means the ability to do what you want with your own machine. No third party interference.
Let Timmy Can’t-Tune bring his guitar to someone who can. Let grandma have her new phone be setup by her grandson appropriately so she can’t install malware.
Freedom. Digital rights.
[...]
> In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats.
All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
[0] Which is rare. I’m installing random shit all the time using homebrew and it’s basically never an issue.
If security was a concern, these hoops would be for all apps, not just unsigned. It just shows the only function it serves is gatekeeping by Apple.
Notice that this is easier for malware authors to do than ordinary people because their business is compromising others' machines, so then they can use the signing keys of any victims who have a developer account, or sign up for new ones using stolen cards from any of the victims.
Meanwhile you would then have Apple revoking the victims' signing certificates and screwing their honest users who can now no longer install the non-malicious software they previously released.
The entire premise is a scam to extract an annual fee from a million small developers.
And revoking a cert for one "dev" does not mean revoking everything, as for them stealing signing keys from other devs (not typical users, but security literate) how often does that happen, especially in the case of apple with sandboxing etc?
> So for, say, your iPad mini plus 2–5 other iPads, the workable setup is: Mac + Xcode → $99/year developer membership → register each iPad's UDID → create an Ad Hoc build → install that build on those devices. You don't have to publish it, make it discoverable, or have Apple review it.
That would work for me, except that I prefer to build web apps instead. There’s nothing I really want to build that couldn’t be done as a web app.
As for why one computing platform would be different than another, if you don’t think there’s any difference then why not use a Raspberry Pi or something?
Yeah...
> then why not use a Raspberry Pi or something?
Because a Raspberry Pi would be very inconvenient to use as a smartphone, obviously. Doesn't explain why it makes sense to treat one ARM computer as a mildly locked jail (Macs) and another as a hard locked jail (iPhones and other handhelds); I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
This is older than the current smartphone duopoly; IIRC, with a few exceptions like the N900 and the Palm Treo, cell phones were always very locked down. It probably came initially from the phone companies being control freaks, and wanting to restrict which devices (even mechanical ones with no electrical or radio interface) could be attached to their phone system.
> N900 and the Palm Treo
Performance-wise, a modern iPhone is more closely comparable to room-sized (building-sized?) supercomputer of that era.
I don't know if we can say that those old phones were locked down: either they could not run any software at all or they run only what they got in their factory settings.
Symbian phones, palmtops from the 90s and the like could run apps and I did write a few of them. Usually Java and an emulator on my computer and an upload to the phone. They were almost general purpose computing devices but it was hard to get a 30% tax on them. All of these policies from Apple derive from the will of making money from services, not only from the hardware. It's understandable because it's a lot of money.
If apps will ever start losing money to Apple (e.g. they are forced to distribute them for free), apps will be dead, the Store will shut down, nothing could be installed anymore (privacy, safety, think of the children) and everything will be done with a web browser.
It would just be limited to 3 apps per device that require to be refreshed every 7 days to continue to be able to open them.
Web apps are a non starter for iOS since the only allowed browser on iOS happens to not support crucial standards and may drop your app's persistent data.
Also, typically a web app stores state in a database in the server.
Because malware breaking the sandbox of one of them can mostly only spy on the owner, while malware breaking the sandbox of the other can spy on whoever the owner walks past, GPS trace their movements…
Question for those with more industry knowledge than me: If you assume a broken sandbox, is it possible for an app to record phone calls, then use that recording to create a deepfaked voice that can then be transmitted as a new call? My naïve assumption is "yes obviously", but for all I know the hardware has some way to activate a switched circuit from the phone service to the speaker and microphone that can't have other sound data pass through it.
Then fix your s****y sandbox, Apple.
[Incoming call: National Security Agency] "Don't you dare stop our malware doing all that stuff you just said".
:P
All the other nations' agencies, outisde Five Eyes at least, will probably want to stop the NSA's malware, but may have their own instead.
Devices which only ran code that the vendor had specially packaged for the device always had other names, like Games Console, Word Processor, MP3 Player, Graphing Calculator, or just plain "Toy." Nobody confused those with computers and nobody accepted them as computers.
Phones entered this world already in that second category, long before Apple even considered making one. Apple kept an iron grip at first and after careful consideration, decided to only allow third-parties to even enter on terms extremely favorable and profitable to Apple, and always under their direct control.
Closing off the Mac would be very messy and also cause tremendous headaches due to it being the development platform for iOS. They don't want to bother. But the reason iOS is closed is because it's always been closed, and they'll never open it unless forced, because money.
Graphing Calculators are computers in every sense, it's hard to find one you can't at least program in a high level language like Basic or Python, and many accept assembly programs - even Texas Instruments models did, before their signing keys were brute forced.
Games consoles too almost invariably run third party code, although they tend not to be end user programmable - no different than an iPhone in that regard, really.
"Feature phones" - pre-smartphone phones with cameras and internet etc - usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer blessing, even though you couldn't touch the OS. You could SSH into servers from those!
I think a big problem is that the distinction between "general purpose computer" and "end user programmable general purpose computer" is functionally meaningless when you can't write programs, which is most people. Instead they understand it in a functional context - what is this device for? How does it compare to how such devices usually work? The general purpose CPU inside is an implementation detail, and just because you think of an iPhone as a computer doesn't mean everyone does. They think of it as a "phone".
I had to respond first to this - I happened to grow up with Verizon phones. They had the manufacturers ship variants that replaced Java with BREW - some locked-down bastardized atrocity with DRM, which could only be acquired through purchasing in an on-device App Store (Called "Get It Now"). I knew about how everyone else had Java on their dumbphones though. But overall in that era the meme is accurate that if you even accidentally pushed the "Internet" button on your phone, the ensuing insane per-KB data charges would be noticeable. No one I know used any such apps or features.
Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest "end user programmable" was a requirement to be a computer. I meant that the computer owner expects that the computer manufacturer isn't gatekeeping.
Now, a GameCube or PlayStation buyer may have seen the gatekeeping as a positive -- knowing that Nintendo wouldn't bless a cartridge/disc that was pornographic, bomb-making instructions, or what have you, they felt it was a safer device to put in a kid's bedroom than a Windows XP computer.
I posit: To normal people, "A computer" is a subset of devices which, conceptually speaking, wants to be usable for a maximum of purposes. In other words, if you gave someone a variety of tasks (Edit the file on this flash drive, do your taxes, sort 100 photos into 3 folders based on occasion and print the best 3 of each, find an email you sent 3 months ago and quote excerpts from it) and then presented them with a bunch of devices from all the categories I mentioned, basically everyone knows a Mac or Windows PC will do that well, and anything else will lack important tools like the filesystem, drivers for hardware, reasonable multitasking, capable browsers, etc and make those tasks painful at best. And if specialized software is needed, that software will likely not run on those other devices.
Every other modern device, including my Apple Watch to a Chromebook to a PS5, is more than capable of all those tasks computationally, but the manufacturers specifically crippled many abilities and blocked all non-blessed software, and Nintendo or Samsung doesn't want you running TurboTax on the Switch or your Smart Fridge.
One thing that ticks me off about this conversation is they are always framed as anti-consumer, instead of anti-developer. It's Tim Sweeney, Mark Zuckerberg, and the ad networks who have the biggest gripe with these policies, not consumers. Consumers are the ones who bear the brunt of the cost when it comes to developers who desperately need to exercise their right to capture every and any piece of data the OS provides.
>If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
thankfully the EU has extensive privacy regulations prohibiting developers from doing just that, so we can enjoy open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century
But your gripe is not about open platforms. Your gripe is that Apple iOS is not an open platform. Those are two different things, there are open platforms out there.
My complaint is that iOS as a closed platform is a feature, and Apple has been a good steward for that platform that has made it a stable computing platform for the general public. Corporations (cosplaying as "poor indie developers"), are simply frustrated that Apple isn't allowing them to abuse their users for extra dollars.
These same "developers" who pretend to care so deeply about open platforms don't even distribute their software on Linux. The concern trolling about open platforms is a farce. Picking on epic games again - you can't play Fortnite on Linux. It's "open platforms for me, but not for thee"
Forget the advertising angle, lets look at payments. Apple forces you to use their payment processor and they charge a larger fee. What does the consumer get? They get a single control panel for all their subscriptions that they can cancel at any time. "Developers" hate this - not because they want to charge you less, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.
If I have to choose between two evil corporations, Apple and the greater tech industry that shit on the web, I'm picking Apple. If I care about open platforms, I'll move to an open platform, not lobby the government for Apple to open theirs.
again, doesn't apply in the EU. Consumer Rights Directive passed a few years ago stipulates that any subscription must be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up, and created a 'two click rule'.
Practical example of this is Amazon, here in the EU it takes exactly two clicks, in a lot of other jurisdictions you have to jump through half a dozen pages.
You might have to choose between two evil corporations, my point was I don't. Here we can open Apple up so they don't get to extract platform rent and I'm still not at the mercy of Tim Sweeney. Being governed by robber barons instead of your own government is an ideological choice, if you enjoy living like that fine but we don't.
A closed platform can only ever be a feature if you're so disempowered that private companies are running circles around you, otherwise it's just anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.
Evil developers forcing poor users to download their applications. Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets, because granny gran installed hax to get free gems for a gacha (that she downloaded from Apple approved App Store).
Stupid users who have neglected to attain perfect and absolute information regarding all the things that the applications they install will do.
Complete non-sequitur. You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.
This is concern trolling. If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about - you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
Because the only difference between Apple and Android crap is only software, of course? I won't fit into the message limit if I start listing issues that I have with Android garbage.
> If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about
Where did I say anything about open platform? Are you hallucinating LLM or something? I just want to install whatever I write for myself without going through the hoops of weekly resigning and big brother approving what I do on a device that I OWN.
> you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
What are you even talking about, lmao!
What are you talking about exactly?
On linux I can run any software I want, and how is that bad?
App developers have shown time and time again that they will abuse every single resource on the user's system they can get their claws into. If they can get it, they will use APIs meant for accessibility and disabled users to remote-control your system. If they can get it, they will use location/GPS when their app has nothing to do with location. If they can get it, they will spam you with notifications and alerts. The USER needs to have control over these and the ability to stop abusive developers from running roughshod over their computers.
For now. It is clear which direction Apple is going.
Strictly speaking, you can. Enable developer mode, connect your phone to your Mac (you need a Mac), and you can build and install whatever code you want.
Asterisks being that your phone will uninstall it after a while I think, and you need to create a free account for Xcode.
And "whatever code you want" here excludes JIT compilation, or as I understand it memory that is both writable and executable, as your app would require a special 'entitlement' from Apple.
I considered getting an iPhone to replace my S-series Samsung, the only reason I stayed with Samsung is for the S-Pen. Had I gone with iPhone I would not be able to write and run my own software? That's absolutely ridiculous.
Don’t worry. They’re working really hard to fix the bug. It’s not intended that you can install without paying a fee.
So... Marketing?
I just bought a new m5 macbook air. The day that I can't treat my MacOS laptop as basically a glorified NeXT workstation and install/run code of my own choice (albeit after going through a few scary warnings in the default user protecting system preferences, like allow to run unsigned code, etc), is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again.
I see news about apple thinking about "merging" MacOS and iOS and making a touch screen macbook and it really makes me think they are going to try to do this in the near future.
Kinda tempted to do that already just because of Liquid Glass.
I mean, if I'm going to be stuck with a *nix OS whose UI is badly thought out and inconsistent between apps, might as well take the cheaper option, right?
It is pretty clear where Apple/MS/Google OSes are headed, and its a bad place.
It sounds similar to people that praise "haptic feedback" on phones, and describe feedback on some devices as extraordinary. (vibration device, seriously?)
Macbook has nice hardware, if I can ignore the strange keyboard layout, although I would prefer bigger keyboard and smaller touchpad. Macbook software is something that is so bad compared to linux that I won't even comment.
Lenovo and Framework have great ones, so does Microsoft and other brands I can’t think of right now.
I also find it that “macOS is well-optimized for touchpads” actually means “macOS is hostile to traditional mice and keyboards so that Apple can sell you external mice that cost 3x the price of alternatives even though you’re using your laptop at a stationary desk with external monitor 80% of the time”.
Plug in a traditional mouse to macOS and you’ll see how horrible the OS is with it for no reason. I needed third party mouse software just to play Minecraft without a horrendous scroll wheel experience for the item bar. There’s no built-in OS setting to have separate scroll directions for trackpad versus external mouse even though such a setup is highly logical. You need third party software for that. Meanwhile, on Linux that configuration option is built-in to Gnome and KDE.
Most trackpad gestures in macOS don’t need to be trackpad gestures at all and seem to be aimed at selling expensive peripherals and making Apple’s trackpad advantage larger than it would be if their system used a different OS. There’s no advantage to three finger swiping versus a traditional keyboard shortcut (to be fair, macOS also offers the keyboard shortcuts).
With the exception of flying on an airplane, grabbing a $30 mouse out of your backpack and plopping it on the table is perfectly acceptable and portable solution and often better than any trackpad imaginable for deep productive work.
Anyway, that last bit is a tangent and a rant of mine, but either way, the list of reasons to prefer a Mac is shrinking every day, if you ask me.
For example, MacBook Pros aren’t at the top of the battery life charts anymore, that honor goes to the Framework 13 Pro with the Panther Lake chips.
I own the original chassis 13, AMD 7640U. My previous laptop was a MacBook Pro M2 14”.
There are some clear downgrades: battery life, screen, speakers. Processing power, yeah, though it’s not like I ever maxed out the one I had.
I love having ample storage though. 2TB/32GN in a MacBook Pro was wildly out of my price range. Back in the good old days of early 2025 buying those components yourself was something like a $200-300 cost while the Mac was closer to a thousand bucks. The keyboard is superior to a MacBook Pro in my eyes. I also started to really, really despise the notch and the way the menu bar software fights it.
My Framework 13 Pro arrives tomorrow. It appears like it should address every complaint I have on my original 13”. It’s just too bad about the RAM situation otherwise LPCAMM2 would be a benefit rather than something of a detractor like it is today. You’re almost better off with soldered memory in the current situation, but hopefully that’s temporary.
It’s a dream with Linux compatibility, as you’d expect. I enjoy the fact that I can play real games on Steam compared to the macOS situation where gaming was always a pain. There are also a lot of things I like about CachyOS and KDE a lot better than macOS. In a lot of ways it’s freeing, but some commercial software is obviously missing.
So sure - the Macbook is better than a cheap ~$500 laptop. But between my work issued Macbook and my nice Dell XPS? Not much difference. In either price or hardware...
Honestly, even between the macbook and my framework - not enough of a difference to really be that upset about (my biggest complaint is mostly just battery life).
---
Personally, I would argue that OS is a much bigger pain point to deal with, and you should probably factor that higher in the decision than the hardware. Just expect to spend roughly the same on the machine (Apple is still ~20% more)
Battery life, weight/portability, ergonomics are critical for a great mobile computing experience.
Apple had a window with M1 devices where I'd probably agree they were just better. Apple also has a history of making devices that are very expensive, and have a corresponding higher quality (ex - in the 2000s when most laptop manufacturers were racing to the bottom, and things like the Eee pc were considered hot - lots of garbage quality windows machines).
But many manufacturers today have entries in the "High quality, high price" category, and they're very similar.
Ex - https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/new-xps-14-lapt...
The size is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the battery life is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the touchpad is almost identical to an M5 laptop (personally, I actually like the touchpad on the xps slightly more because the cutout on the front of macbooks is sharp, and I find it annoying and painful for long use, but I also have very large hands and I'm left handed).
And also - the price is functionally the same as the new M5 laptops.
All of those land in the +/- 10% range of each other. With just slight differences (ex - I can get a touchscreen on the XPS if I want, but it makes the battery life 15hrs instead of 18hrs on the macbook. The XPS is also fractionally lighter (3lbs vs 3.4lbs). The macbook is ~10% faster on single core benchmarks then the intel series 3, but identical to slightly worse on multicore. etc...)
Basically - unless you're actually using different machines here... stop it, you're talking out your ass (cough - fanboy - cough).
Even the framework... yes - it's clearly not as "good" as the $3600 macbook I have. I don't expect it to be given I paid ~$1500 for it. But it also excels in other areas that make it worth considering - I have 3 young kids, and I've had the screen pulled flat several times, the touchpad got a cup of milk dumped in it, and my oldest shoved a screwdriver into a usb-c port. Turns out new screen hinges were ~$19, the touchpad was ~$21, and the replacement port was $9. All done at home myself with simple tools.
Compared to several trips to a store and weeks without a laptop... that's a type of ergonomics that I prefer right now.
I've had various work and personal MacBooks over the years and don't really miss them. It sounds like their quality has gotten somewhat better in recent cycles but the era of keyboards so fragile they break if you sneeze on them, and gimmicks like turning part of the keyboard into a touch screen were terrible. I would absolutely take a Linux machine from that era that costs half as much over any of those devices.
One caveat is that there are Apple-specific features like some of the trackpad gestures that I've never been a heavy user of. Partly because they aren't that interesting to me, and partly because I don't like having my workflows and muscle memory tied to a specific platform I don't control. Someone heavily into those features might have a harder time switching away.
I bought a Linux laptop 1 or 2 years ago (after many years of using Macbooks), and was very surprised how well Linux works nowadays.
As a matter of fact, in many areas Linux is even better than macOS. There's so many annoying bugs in macOS that interrupt your workflow on a daily basis. So, my Linux laptop is a lot more stable too.
Would definitely recommend giving Linux a try (Unless maybe if you have very little "tech" knowledge. I would not recommend it to everyone and their grandmother just yet, since they probably aren't aware of the consequences and howto migrate things.)
(for reference: EndeavourOS, KDE)
People talk about it every time Apple releases a new major OS update with UI changes that make macOS and iOS look similar, or a new laptop form factor, because it gets clicks. It's basically the new "Apple is Doomed!" (Which, in case you weren't paying attention to the tech press pre-2010, was the perennial narrative around them—and yes, it did take years after the runaway success of the iPhone for the stories to stop.)
Are we really still having this discussion? I feel like you KNOW the answer, and why the market rewards Apple for its position here.
The curated experience on iOS is a feature, not a bug.
Which experience do you mean? The crApp Store full of obvious scams? The abuse of the built-in push notifications and apps to advertise Apple "services" on every device? I mean, how many damn times do I have to say no to Apple Arcade or iCloud+?
Maybe iOS just isn't for you.
Because they want more money
> Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
Because Mac users will buy it anyway
BTW you can't download and run arbitrary code on your Mac unless you break out a terminal and do developer-y things, because notarization has been a requirement on macOS for years. There is no clicking through scary warnings. macOS will simply tell you that an unnotarized app is broken and refuse to open it via any GUI path that exists. You'll have to strip the quarantine xattrs at the UNIX level to bypass it.
Then why did they recently launch a MacBook that costs less than an iPhone and a marketing campaign targeted at existing iPhone users?
https://www.apple.com/mac/mac-does-that/
https://www.tiktok.com/@apple
There's also a circularity issue. To write iOS apps you need a platform more flexible than iOS.
Actually, it is just apple started with app store/closed with the iphone, and got away with it.
for the mac - I don't think they could close the platform.
What I think they could do is make the ipad more appealing, add a keyboard, then kill the mac like they killed the mac pro. (fire your low-value customers)
Good question - maybe ask Epic why they sued Apple and Google while ignoring Sony and Nintendo?
> it doesn’t really explain why a company like Epic would be OK with paying that fee to Sony but not to Apple.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/08/as-epic-attacks-apple...
> A person buys a handheld computer
> I make a program for the computer
> A person downloads the program directly onto their computer
> A person makes a purchase for services within my app on their computer
> Somehow Apple gets 5% of the proceeds, despite being entirely uninvolved except for the initial sale of goods
An analogous situation would be Mercedes-Benz demanding 5% of every ride booked in a taxi they manufactured, for the reason that they have to continue to make and sell parts for the vehicle, and everyone (including the EU) somehow being A-OK with it.
There may be consequences, however.
Imagine we could run what we wanted. Imagine that we could use whatever payment system we wanted.
Imagine if apple wanted you to use Apple app X, it would need to compete and make it amazing, not just lock you in. Same with payment systems.
Imagine if you could replace the battery of your old phone, and use it for as long as you wished. Without Apple forcing upgrades through their usual tactics.
Apple tells me that it won't even accept applications that target pre-13 soon. And then pre-15 next year.
I hate them.
The fact that this is our current state of tech, tells me that all of the politicians are bought, and that the tech sector has rotten.
And the cost of the device sold to end users. And possibly other service fees such as iCloud subscriptions. These are avenues for Apple to earn money to invest in R&D.
The nominal developer program fee is not designed to be Apple's profit generator. It's to keep spammers out.
Just don't buy an iphone and move on with your life.
Apple has conveniently, for them, set themselves up as an unwanted middleman.
This is only possible for them to do because they make billions per quarter and I’m a struggling solo developer.
I can’t believe people are defending apple.
I don't see users complaining, it's mostly developers.
You don’t think users wouldn’t prefer to pay less for their software?
Do you think most users have given this a thought? Do you think they are even aware of the issue?
In fact, you will have a guarantee of failure if e.g. your messaging app doesn't support iOS
What is it about letting them restrict what people can do in order to squeeze even more money out of them and other companies that appeals to you so much?
Where do you think this should stop?
Should my wifi router be allowed to only work with some brands of phone or laptop?
Should my mobile service provider be allowed to ask for a percentage of any payment I use over their connection?
Should my car by allowed to refuse to park if the owner of the car park doesn't share ticket revenue with its manufacturer?
If not, why not?
Personally, I choose to believe that just like some things cannot legally be agreed to contractually (even if they're in the contract and you sign it), some business models should also be unacceptable to society. That includes any situation where by owning a platform, media property, or content/service delivery technology or provider, a company wants to force itself as a middleman between any two parties.
Do you do anything else?
They will keep their margins as high as possible.
If they absorbed those costs, and those of RAM increases, their margin could drop to like 30% or 35%.
Therefore I would challenge the idea that it is fair for developers to pay Apple a 15/26% commission for the privilege of distributing apps.
If developers were one single business that Apple has to deal with to get third party apps made for their phone, they would be paying us a commission instead of the other way around.
Apple actively prevents users from installing any other OS on an iPhone. Apple actively prevents uses from finding and installing apps through other means.
I'd be okay paying App Store fees when I had a choice, and decided that it's the best source of apps, worth the cost. But because I'm forced to pay for a service I didn't ask for, fuck Apple.
(and the mobile duopoly, ecosystem lock-ins, and barriers to entry mean I can't really refuse this shit, I can only choose one of two flavors of this shit).
Imagine if every purchase of an application on Windows had to pay a 5% EU allowed Microsoft Monopoly tax.
Is Apple still able to apply this to digital stores too, like Kindle ebooks, or has that at least been fixed? Because, again, imagine if Microsoft also required you to pay a 5% tax on every purchase made on Windows.
It's just crazy that the EU literally worked with Apple to allow this.
It seams that for "reader apps" (like Netflix / Spotify), things got slightly better (https://developer.apple.com/support/reader-apps/#:~:text=16....):
> Beginning October 1, 2026, reader apps distributed in the EU may promote out-of-app offers for digital goods and services without an actionable link [...]
So you can now at least promote your offers, which was forbidden previously.
A reader app is, in Apples words: "With reader apps, people can sign in to their account created outside the app, letting them view and enjoy previously purchased media content or content subscriptions on their Apple device."
This is one of the most 'evil' policies I've simply ever heard of. I know today it's not even allowed to mention it, but it seems like the most slam dunk monopoly abuse possible. The damage to customers is clear, a company could charge 15% less and receive the same amount if they were simply 'allowed' to tell customers to go to their site. Somehow Fortnite did exactly this, got banned for it, and it still wasn't enough to put an end to it.
If it helps, think if Windows apps had a 5% Microsoft tax and had to be approved by Apple.
When they were found in the US to have a monopoly, they had around 95% of personal computer operating system share. Apple isn’t even close.
For iPhone apps Apple is way behind with about 0.005% of the total 2.17 million iPhone apps.
I.e. the monopoly question is: if apple takes X% for each app in this market, and a competitor can't take less, then it's a monopoly.
Such an absurd definition of what a monopoly is.
My local Walmart has shelves dedicated to selling the products of other companies, and yet I can't just waltz in and set up my own stand in the middle of a Walmart. Walmart is monopolizing Walmart store space! Well, yes, of course it is. Walmart store space is not a market. Something like business real estate might be, but Walmart is not monopolizing that.
Apple is like 20% of the phone market. There is no market in which Apple is a dominant monopoly.
All countries with a working democracy would class Apple as a monopoly as it has significant market power, enough to distort prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
The market is mobile devices.
Now suppose you have an iPhone and want to download an app, or want to distribute your app to customers many of which have an iPhone. What substitute for Apple's store is available to do that?
More specifically your question is like asking what if you have a car that requires diesel, what substitute is available to let you use cheaper gasoline?
Yea defining the market is 95% of anti trust cases. But asking yourself 'if Microsoft did what Apple is doing' should be enough to show at some point, it is a market.
It's like asking what the available substitute is for diesel fuel from Shell, to which the answer is diesel fuel from Chevron, BP, Sunoco, etc.
So now what are the available substitutes for distributing apps to devices that require iOS apps and can't run Android apps?
Apple can change their rules and it materially impacts the market.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/glossary/competit...
And on the iPhone, you MUST use the Apple App Store, not just as a means to distribute your app, but as your payment provider. You can’t collect payment details yourself, use Stripe, Paddle, anything. You MUST use Apple.
You simply cannot enter business without paying Apple a share. That’s a monopoly.
1) find some space on the shelf and your stock room to put my stuff! 2) I don’t have a store with shelves or visiting customers, but you will sell this for me at 0% profit!
You’re paying for sales access to millions of devices with frictionless checkout.
And you want to… make it harder to check out? Because you think you’re entitled sell things to their user base?
No one wants to go to your website. You’re crazy.
However, in this scenario every neighbourhood only has 2 STORES - and each CUSTOMER only shops at one of these STORES.
Then, if you made HATS, the only way to sell HATS is to get them on the shelves of both those stores.
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This is Australia: two major supermarkets - so the only way to sell a lot of your product is to submit to the terms of Coles or Woolworths.
1. the existing STORES also sell almost all the CARS, and the GPS in these cars is hardcoded to only drive to one of their STORES
2. The government is considering a law that forces everyone to show their ID to open the door and drive their CAR,
3. To enfore #2, the government is considering a law to prevent drivers from manually entering GPS coordinates to any other stores, because the two existing STORES promise to enforce the ID-verification system in their parking lots.
Now you want to sell your HAT, good luck, because anybody trying to open up a Hat-Droid store with your product in it, is soon legally prevented from doing so. For security purposes. Think of the children!
It's not about the market for apps, or the market for smartphones. Those markets are comparable to any market.
This is about the market for apps ON the apple ecosystem. And the problem that is being solved is: Apple can't have a monopoly on that market, such that they can (for example) charge a commission for every sale.
Basically: we can't allow a company to be so successful that their STORE becomes a MARKET.
Plenty of other companies manufacture hardware and run stores. If we’re going to say that isn’t allowed, then at least make the rule across the board.
How many new companies will be popping up to manufacture these types of devices? Not many.
I think the reality is that the EU sees an opportunity to apply some pressure on a few successful foreign companies, as that potentially provides them leverage in other negotiations, or at the very least some revenue from fines.
How does that matter? Are you suggesting we must treat a massive company the same as a not-massive company? Once they reach a certain size, they're at risk of being a monopoly. Until they do, they're not. This is just a matter of size.
What I’m suggesting is that it’s at best sloppy, and at worst corrupt, to arbitrarily apply rules in the way the EU is doing. If you think it’s wrong for a hardware manufacturer to be the sole operator of an app or software store on their platform, that’s fine. Make your rule, apply it to everyone, and give people N years to come into compliance.
The reason the EU isn’t doing that in these cases is because they don’t want to apply these laws to EU companies, and it gives them leverage in negotiations with foreign companies.
If you made HATS and sold them at a STORE (is the all caps thing legalese or why do we talk this this?), and the owner of the BIG STORE walked into your STORE and told you:
"Nice STORE you have there! Would be a shame if something happened to all those HATS of yours. Pay us a five percent commission, otherwise your HATS will stop working."
We have a word for those situations, and any democratic society would discourage that type of entrepreneurship long before it came to that. It's just that we should have done something long before our pensions were dependent on these companies which are now too big to fail.
You’re describing racketeering, and in your analogy, you have a store.
But in reality, you don’t have a store, so the hypothetical doesn’t make any sense.
Do you want to try rail lines? You want to ship your HATS on a freight TRAIN, but you don’t have a TRAIN or even a RAIL.
Do you think the rail owner or the freight train will carry your product for free?
Are you willing to pay the storage and bandwidth costs for Fortnite since Epic apparently can’t afford to?
For the apps to go away the store for free must be imposed on Apple, Google and everybody else but I don't think it will ever happen. If it will, people will use the browser and that would be enough. Some JS APIs will be dismissed, some hardware will be removed, some functionality will become impossible and slowly forgotten. Nobody will cry too much and business and entertainment as usual.
even the name "sideloading" has come into being. When the PC first came out it was just "running".
And the "distribute" part is a self-imposed limitation by Apple. Developers would be happy to host their own ipa files.
I'll state plainly: Apple should get 0% of the non-Apple-processed payments.
- You link out (or even payments in-app not through Apple): Apple gets 0%
- You aren't in the app store: Apple gets 0%
They should have to actually compete, do things like allow developers to give refunds, allow different monetization strategies (upgrade pricing?), make App Store Connect _not_ a steaming pile of shit.
The rent-seeking has got to stop.
Apple makes money on the hardware, Apple makes money off developers, Apple makes money off ads, Apple makes plenty of money. Taxing every financial activity (expect for the growing list of carve-outs which look sillier and sillier as time goes on) is beyond the pale.
I will say that I think the 30% deal was a good deal when the App Store launched but times have changed, taking payments online has gotten easier, hosting something like the App Store has gotten cheaper, and the App Store does not provide enough value to deserve so rich a cut.
The crap apps that sail by review while legitimately good and well-crafted Apps get held up is but one example. If App Review was faster and/or better we might be having a different conversation but Apple has not upheld its end of the bargain and has the audacity to still think they deserve a huge cut.
There are whole categories of apps I wish I had on my iPhone that will never see the light of day because of Apple's policies and/or they are DOA because Apple wants 30% [0].
If macOS launched today I probably wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole because of how locked down it would be. Even now we have to fight to run the software we want unless it's signed. How Apple doesn't see that they are killing the golden goose is beyond me. There is plenty of money for them to make and the only way Apple can continue to squeeze is due to anti-competitive practices which harm all consumers.
I still think the DMA was ham-fisted and written by complete morons but it was a step in the right direction. It's too bad our "elected" officials are bought and paid for and too busy engaging in one-upmanship or cheap shots to do anything close to actually governing.
Lastly, I continue to find it disgusting and immoral how much money Apple makes off incredibly unsavory practices like the casinos for children (and adults) they promote and encourage (gems, coins, tokens, loot boxes, and the list goes on). Our corrupt politicians are complicit in abdicating any responsibility for the cesspool which is 99% of IAP.
[0] Yes, I know it's 15% for small business but while they tout that regularly it's not so black and white. There are cliffs, it's not progressive, and you have to apply for it. 1 good year can screw you over and using just revenue as the marker is wrong IMHO.
Yeah, because developers have historically been super reasonable when it comes to pricing.
Just the other day someone posted a truly simple camera app with a freaking subscription in place. For crying out loud.
With the way developers like to price their apps, I’m sort of glad Apple is taking a chunk of the money. Fuck subscription based apps.
A quick Google produces nothing. Fishy.
Lol - I've been using the phrase "casino games for children" to describe Apple's primary App Store cash cow since I first heard someone use it since it describes the genre so well. And I just realized this latest policy is them saying "Nobody exploits children with casino games but us!"
Installing software in iOS uses Apple intellectual property and WIPO guarantees their right to charge a commission.
If you don’t like this, get rid of WIPO!
Installing software on the iPhone is not at all straightforward. It requires interacting with proprietary Apple software and rights management interfaces. Had the DMA been written 20 years ago, it is possible that they could have prevented Apple from implementing things this way. But they didn’t. It’s too late.
Anyway, once you understand how software is installed on an iPhone, you can plainly see how nearly all of WIPO applies.
God damn it all to hell when even the comms department issues stupid crap like this.