Honestly, for anyone who watches Apple close enough, this isn't news.
Its clear Apple are heading down the disruptive disintermediation route.
Look at the Air Tag. Effectively killing off competitors by making use of the global network of Apple devices.
Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.
Or look at the fact they still haven't rolled out Apple card internationally. My uninformed guess is that it is more to do with "something's brewing" rather than the US cards not working.
Their recent satphone announcement. Clearly that's just the start. I think most people are guessing the endgame will be carrier disintermediation. And frankly, given how shit most cell carriers are, I can't wait for Apple to come along and give the incumbents a run for their money.
Their new weather forecasting service is also intriguing. They will soon have millions of thermometer-equipped Apple Watches in the world (IIRC the Series 8 and AWU will have these), allowing them to create an incredibly detailed mapping of temperatures around the world (or at least places where people can afford expensive watches...).
I'm not sure what happened but Dark Sky went from awesome to awful in recent months after the Apple acquisition. Is it just me? Going from "no rain all day" to actively raining with a huge storm 2 hours later. The app does update with this info, but very close to the actual storm.
As an Android user, it used to be a fun party trick at the bar, to show everyone the alert on my phone from dark sky that it was going to start raining in X minutes or that it was going to stop raining in Y minutes and then everyone checking later and it being basically down to the second accurate.
As a former paid user of Dark Sky that lost that information when Apple bought them I feel no sympathy for iOS users that Dark Sky has gone to crap
I am sad such an amazing tool for the world was destroyed by a corporation trying to deprive another corporation so they could maybe make a little more money.
The integration of dark sky was definitely rocky but apple is running dark sky as a data api now, this android app is apparently using it as it’s weather data source now:
I too have noticed this. I believe the Dark Sky website and app will continue to become less accurate... I think the explanation is (somebody who knows more please correct me): Dark Sky's technology was acquired by Apple and integrated into the Apple Weather built-in app... and the decision was made that any improvements/updates/maintenance on the Dark Sky service itself are accessible exclusively through that Apple Weather app now. As a user of the Dark Sky website, I feel sad.
It's not just you, but this started well before the Apple acquisition. I "sold" many copies of the Dark Sky app to family and friends just by showing its magic but that magic died awhile ago. I don't think it's been very accurate for 3-4 years now.
This study claims that there was a decrease in weather prediction accuracy caused by the reduction in commercial flights due to Covid. Maybe there are still some lingering effects from that?
The former is going to be literally true on the grounds that climate change is increasing chaos in the system, hence unpredictability increases strikingly.
I'm not sure this happens on the time scale of 'app got acquired', though. It's absolutely going to increase year by year, and if you'd got used to how it was three years ago and didn't notice some of the outlier events, you might be shocked at the new normal.
Climate change absolutely will cause problems with any conceivable forecasting model because you can't encapsulate chaos, only map its expected potential outcomes: and the nasty truth is that energy is fed into the system, those potential outcomes blow up exponentially. Not even slightly linear. So that's what we're seeing.
Those watches measure the temperature at the underside of the device, i.e. the temperature of the wearer not the air. And that data they claim stays on your phone, not in their cloud.
They called out in the presentation that it's also got an ambient temperature sensor just underneath the display, to help calibrate body-temp vs room-temp for the overnight "difference from baseline" temperature measurements.
Agreed on the local-storage-for-health-data bit, but I'm sure they could argue that the ambient sensor isn't privacy-relevant.
I would bet that the internal sensor is used in a model with the skin sensor to remove the effects of the internal temperature of the watch and get a more accurate skin temp reading.
Not so sure about this. There's going to be a ton of noise in this data from an outsider POV. At an absolute minimum, for this to be usable as weather data they will have to determine when it's measuring the actual outside weather, as opposed to the indoor, or in-car/-bus/-train temperature.
> At an absolute minimum, for this to be usable as weather data they will have to determine when it's measuring the actual outside weather,
Does Apple Watch have a light sensor for an auto dimming display? If so, that can be used as a proxy for indoor/outdoor. It isn't great, shade and such. Throw barometer in there, and you can do a decent job.
Microsoft Band had a UV sensor, so we were able to get pretty accurate detection of indoor/outdoor when combined with all the other sensors, at least during the day. I'm sad UV sensors didn't take off on smart watches in general, it is a super useful sensor to have, but they are rather large and even the lens material to go over them is different than what is otherwise required for a wearable.
I don't see this working effectively. A UV sensor is great during daytime, but what about at night?
Then, you still have to account for the fact that your thermometer is located right next to a variable ~100W heater, vs. normal weather stations that are normally located away from heat sources. Also, the thermometer and heater are occasionally placed inside a tight-fitting insulated container.
Good point! During times when AC or heat is running a lot, there might be a bimodal distribution of reported temperatures. I wonder if they could use the ambient light sensor to determine if the person is inside or outside, or if they could use location data to figure out that 'this Apple Watch is in the middle of a large field, so he must be outside'. Then they could just ignore other data in that microclimate area, and create a weather mapping based on watches located in known open areas.
Yep, there will always be exceptions. But taking the median of a decently-filtered set could work. And Apple obviously has a team of folks working on this to come up with something smarter than some random HNer (me) who's just shooting from the hip).
> And Apple obviously has a team of folks working on this to come up with something smarter than some random HNer (me) who's just shooting from the hip).
Don't talk like that, its a self defeating mindset. You are likely as competent as most Apple engineers (the 10x benefit from less inhibitions and tons of energy.
The people working at apple are like most of us here, curious and driven. Apple has a lot of money to throw at people who bring in experience whereas you and I are individuals who do not work in the field of "figuring out where things are using computers." So we obviously are not experts in the field and not familiar with existing and emerging solutions for the problem.
It's not that much better than the normal network of AMS sensors.
For one, it doesn't give you wind speeds at various levels (critical for predicting weather).
Second, it doesn't give you any additional readings over oceans, which is where the data is lacking in the current network of data.
It does give you more robust surface temperature readings in cloudy areas but that doesn't really help you predict the weather significantly better.
Yeah, but maybe Apple will take all of this private data, and then build their own GCM, and solve data assimilation for their new model … yeah right.
Let’s pretend that data from user portable devices isn’t garbage (it is): then what do you even do with it? In cities you’ll have thousands of readings per voxel none of which are more valuable. Then you have to clean your data, excluding data from inside or vehicles or hot pavement or heated patios and so on. Apple won’t go to the expense of running their own GCM, and I doubt even mesoscale models. All I could see is some sort of correlative AI, doing microscale adjustments to government sponsored models. So all of this work, and maybe you get one degree better at forecasts and a bit of nowcasting. And because it isn’t physics-based, you might occasionally get something very wrong happening.
The oceans are a data hole (technical term, really) as you mentioned, but the real missing data is above the surface. It’s too bad about Project Loon, because that would have been much more helpful to forecasting than a million monkeys wearing watches.
I glide quite a bit, so I'm VERY interested in low level micro climate.
Is there a really no use in having higher resolution for modeling the boundary layer?
It seems like having a mountain covered in tiny barometric and temp sensors could at least validate a lot of what we think we know about the boundary layer.
I personally would love to be able to see what the temperature at the bottom and top of a given topographic feature is, as well as how atmospheric pressure is deviating from pure altitude differences.
I build instruments for gliders so I know that the sensors in our phones are capable of incredibly fine resolution. Is there really no use for billions of high resolution data points in climate science?
And, well, are ouside at the time. Also need to consider location of the watch, easy to heat it just by sun (in summer) or by wearing long sleeves (when it's colder)
Apple doesn’t need a weather app to obtain location data from users. If they were going to track and sell location data they would just do it invisibly through iOS itself. This (and other tracking opportunities) is the reason Google gives Android away for “free”.
Maybe, but the watch can be enclosed up a sleeve, in a car, in an office, house, direct sunlight, in the shade... Good if it takes all that into account.
People say this because accountants don’t like capital spending.
Carriers have 50-60% gross margins. They are critical enough to get special tax treatments to deal with the capital expenses. If the goal is to make money, what would be the “best” business? Drug cartel?
nobody actually cares about margin. you can be entirely unprofitable so long as you show growth quarter after quarter. amazons margins are razor thin if not negative. tesla wasn’t profitable at all until EV legislation, and still struggles to be so
Apple's cell service network is pretty much tapped out at the total active iPhone MAUs...
Sure, Apple's theoretical cell subscribers could grow a lot - but no one is going to care...
It would be such a small part of the profits compared to hardware sales and other services - with a MASSIVE capital cost - probably much higher than phone R&D.
It would be less capital intensive and possibly more profitable for Apple to manufacture their own phones than start their own carrier business... And that's a horrible idea, too...
The idea of starting your own carrier business that isn't an MVNe is almost absurd.
Why doesn't Tesla build their own roads while we're at it?
So is semiconductor fabrication, and Apple has been ridiculously successful as a middle-man there in both directions: Customers get the most advanced chips available at consumer prices. TSMC gets whatever capital they need, either advanced or in guaranteed order contracts.
> Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.
For what it's worth I think BNPL is simply an attempt by Apple to get some yield on their insane cash pile. Last year they had over $0.2T on hand. [1] They're making it faster than they seem to be able to return it to shareholders.
BNPL is a pretty bad business - margins are low, buyers are generally not qualified in the same way as other lending, ticket sizes are low, and collections aren't worth it (you really gonna repossess my $20 gently-used socks?). However, if Apple has a better way to qualify the customers (a big if)...
They can take ~3-4% of the transaction, net like 0.5% for a 6 week loan, which is like a 4.5% APR. Their margins may be better than peers since they can use their own cash instead of raising debt. Maybe 6-7% APR. It's also short-term debt that turns over fast so it's highly liquid.
My wholly uninformed opinion is that this is more of a cash management product that happens to be built on their data for Apple than a data product per se. After all you can't just roll up at BofA with a $0.2T check and get that kind of APR.
> They can take ~3-4% of the transaction, net like 0.5% for a 6 week loan, which is like a 4.5% APR. Their margins may be better than peers since they can use their own cash instead of raising debt. Maybe 6-7% APR. It's also short-term debt that turns over fast so it's highly liquid.
Apple has said they'll be charging zero interest and zero fees for this service, including zero late fees, so where the yield will be coming from is unclear. That said, I confess that I don't have a deep understanding of the BNPL market.
If they don't collect from buyers, they can collect from sellers. If you look back to when credit cards were new, you had them making shops agree not to charge credit card users more, despite the fees. That put cash users at a newfound disadvantage, and shops had to put up with it because card users were numerous enough.
That's exactly right. BNPLs generally charge more than credit card acquirers do, something in the 3-4% range, but the breakdown of these numbers tend to be closely guarded and that reflects outside estimates. One has to imagine Apple thinks they can command a premium here too.
With respect to cards: cards have a number of advantages for both merchants and customers. Cash is not free to handle and carries risk (theft, etc) and it's really slow. Credit card buyers tend to have larger average ticket sizes (20% larger was the last one I saw) and card buyers have more confidence buying from smaller shops knowing that they can always charge back the merchant if something goes terribly wrong. In a real way chargebacks are a big part of how we got e-commerce.
Merchant agreements generally precluded credit surcharges but they always allowed cash discounts. This is commonly seen at US gas stations to this day. They also prohibited credit card minimum purchase amounts. To my knowledge both of these are no longer true.
Shops aren't putting up with cards so much as embracing them because that's how their customers want to pay, and they don't want to miss out on a sale.
Competition is great, especially when it breaks oligopolies, I just hope stuff like the Digital Markets Act will manage to stop them from abusing their positions to make their solution a monopoly
Kind of like how the only thing net neutrality did was prevent t-mobile from creating Netflix unlimited fast lanes? Or how all those bills states signed into law to encourage high speed networks not only didn't create high speed networks, but legally preventing other companies from competing?
The more this gets legislated the harder it will be for someone to enter the market later on, Apple (among other tech giants) aren't going to sit back while you write the laws, it'll be the other way around.
This would be an absolute dream, dealing with carriers has been hell since the beginning. I often do upgrade my phone, but it's been a huge hassle. Sometimes the promos don't work well and they basically wrap you into a contract anyways. I'm honestly just going to pay extra cash and upgrade directly through Apple even though the carrier offers a bigger credit.
If I could cut them out all together and buy an iPhone and cell service with Apple. Done.
No it hasn't. There wasn't a specific grevience listed so you really dont know if European regulations have solved it or not. I'm an American but have spent years living in Europe and dealing with carriers there has its own frustrations.
These sorts of comments are common but always strike me as having been made by someone with little to no real world experience on the specific issue being discussed.
> with little to no real world experience on the specific issue being discussed.
I lived in France and now I'm in Germany, still using my French sim card, for no additional cost. I can change carriers whenever I want with no delay and transfer my number to the new carrier, all of that for much cheaper than what was available in the US when I was living there.
No contract, no hidden fees, no loops to jump through to cancel a subscription, it just works. I really don't see what one more monopoly would solve.
Feel free to publish your list of grievances, I suspect they're extremely out of the ordinary
> you really dont know if European regulations have solved it or not
Ask anybody who has lived in the UK long enough about Vodafone.
The story normally goes something like this:
- 90s = Dogs bollocks, nobody came close
- 00s = Started to smell a bit, but still the most robust technical service
- early 10s = Really starting to rest on their laurels now
- late 10s – today = Shit, godawful shit.
> Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.
Isn't that just tax evasion and/or "investment" in a time with negative interest ?
> Or look at the fact they still haven't rolled out Apple card internationally. My uninformed guess is that it is more to do with "something's brewing" rather than the US cards not working.
Banking and credit card operations are some of the most regulated businesses in the world, and financial authorities have different requirements from country to country, which would make it prohibitively expensive to roll out on a global scale.
We are going to see satphone use on most handsets I think fairly soon (starting with low badwith options). The idea of Apple operating their own carrier is interesting but also sort of terrifying - they are already all about keeping everything in their own ecosystem and making interoperability with other brands a huge PIA - are we going to see the day when Apple devices intentionally barely function with other carriers / brands / OS?
Because Apple want to control the quality of the user experience.
Right now Apple Hardware and Apple Software are tightly interlinked. Apple can do things in software because they design 100% of the hardware, and vice-versa.
There's a lot of stuff Apple do in terms of quality of experience that's only possible because of that tight integration. Stuff that would be impossible to do with generic hardware and generic software.
But equally Apple know that if you buy an iPhone, you are dependent on a carrier for service. Like the rest of the world, it has probably not escaped Apple's attention that the quality of service you get from the carriers is becoming rapidly worse by the day. As a result, an Apple user's poor experience with an iPhone might have nothing to do with Apple but everything to do with the carrier.
Having carrier level integration with iPhone could also open up further user experience improvements (e.g. maybe they could do clever stuff at carrier level to help preserve battery).
> Because Apple want to control the quality of the user experience.
you nailed it.. they are concerned about the "quality of the user experience" and not the billions of dollars at stake?
Is this why Apple artificially limits which machines can be updated to MacOS as well, to ensure the quality of the user experience and not to drive sales?
> Like the rest of the world, it has probably not escaped Apple's attention that the quality of service you get from the carriers is becoming rapidly worse by the day.
In my experience, mobile connectivity just keeps getting better and better. I have lived on both US coasts and traveled to multiple developing countries, and even in places like Zimbabwe I had pretty great connectivity considering where I was.
> In my experience, mobile connectivity just keeps getting better and better.
To clarify ....
When I spoke of "quality of service" above, I didn't mean technical service (although for some carriers it can be a factor), I meant customer service.
I think you'll struggle to find anyone who will say their carrier's customer service has improved in recent years. Carrier customer service, irrespective of what country you live in, is generally globally accepted to only be in the "awful to non-existent" range.
My experience with T-mobile US is one of the things I'll rarely gush over. They are hands-down the best customer service I've ever gotten from a carrier.
Even with several friends/family on our 10-line plan (to share costs) - it's been a breeze to maintain.
As I sit here on an iPad Pro that refused to correctly highlight and copy a piece of your post so I could directly reply to it, I just want you to know that nobody views the whole “Apple can do unique things because they own the hardware/software stack” in a positive light. Apple is very bad at software and I will always stand by that… it is very sad that such nice pieces of hardware are married to some of the worst software.
Subjective, but I'll second this as an Apple user - at least for iOS devices. I mostly like the design, but I'm appalled at how glitchy the interface controls are, for one. And it has been consistently so for years.
Don't even get me started on the Apple TV. I've never been able to reliably use the remote (physical or app).
A monopoly would require they control the entire market for a given product or service. Apple isn't a monopoly in any area - but they are a strong competitor in many areas. They're more like a western take on a chaebol [1] in my opinion.
Intermediate to what? They own the software, hardware, and are moving toward owning the network and billing relationship.. Intermediate between consumers and app builders maybe, but as they build more features into their own devices (e.g. Apple Maps), even those relationships are being brought into the ecosystem.
Apple is really uniquely positions to just decide to make a (crypto)currency. Push the app to every iPhone, give everyone with an Apple device X amount, and strong support for business + peer-to-peer transactions and you have the best easiest path to mass adoption possible.
You're falling for the standard crypto trap of being a solution in search of a problem. The user experience you're describing is Venmo. Making it use CookCoin instead of USD doesn't make it easier to build, and it isn't really a selling point.
What I'm describing is Venmo + Square. Neither of those 2 things completely implement what I'm describing on their own. Regardless, I didn't say that it had to be crypto. My entire point was they have a the easiest path of any company to critical mass adoption of a service because they directly control the software of half the phones in the US.
My primary credit card is an apple card, primary dev machine is a mbp, primary work machine iPad, phone iPhone, watch Apple, and I have air tags attached to my dogs and wallet.
In this ecosystem, I can reference _ANY_ of my screens for necessary and current relevant information whether it be curated or automated without breaking a glance to whatever primary device the content came from.
I can air drop to my screens and other people in my family whenever I want to share anything from any of my devices.
It's a walled garden sure, but the toys in here are fantastic.
I also have Apple One service because of the iCloud storage alone between devices and Apple Music/News is actually a nice service.
So I guess I understand the "Oh no big company taking over more of my stuff that I think I should diversify because it seems like the right thing to do", but I guess I'm just too used to things just functioning well that I get over how "limited" I am.
Yeah, if all you have in your home are Apple devices, sure. You can have a nice experience.
I dropped all my sympathy towards Apple and gave my MBP13 to my girlfriend the day they willingly implemented an outdated version of SMB in OSX that broke compatibility with almost all of my other machines.
I had a leftover Cinema 24inch display too. I sold it because to regulate its brightness I had to install a custom driver under Windows, and to tinker a lot under Linux, because the damn thing had no physical buttons. It is a primary function of a display device.
No more Apple devices for me, thanks. These are just overpriced toys.
As a Android user who is lured by the appeal of the Apple Watch and the long update availability, I have recently found that the wall of the garden has gotten so high that it is harder to get in than thought:
- there is no way to migrate messages from Signal messenger from Android to iOS
- there is no way to synchronize Opera bookmarks from Android to iOS
- SwiftKey keyboard can't sync my Android settings to iOS
> there is no way to migrate messages from Signal messenger from Android to iOS
Talking only about iOS and Signal here. What you describe is entirely Signal’s decision not to allow backups and restores (on iOS Signal made an explicit decision not to allow any sort of backup and restore). Signal only allows transfer of chats from one iOS device to another when both devices are in close proximity. If Signal wanted to, it could’ve asked the user to enter a strong password, use that to encrypt backups and store them anywhere (iCloud or Dropbox or on a Mac/PC).
Many apps provide backup and restore. Heck, WhatsApp, which uses the Signal protocol, recently implemented cross platform backup and restore for chats. So it’s not technology that’s stopping anyone. Signal is just adamant on not doing it because security.
Agreed. It is a stupid decision by Signal/WhisperSystems. They could easily offer backup for instance via a trusted PC or offer a paid service or just encrypt as you said.
Mine is an anecdote of one but I was quite annoyed to learn that I couldn't migrate my Signal messages from my old Android to iOS when I switched 1.5 years ago. That annoyance lasted about a month until I realized that I never had need for those old messages anyway. I can't say I ever really missed them once they were gone.
... and that's where antitrust should come in at some point. I like that Apple stuff works so well. I don't like that they very intentionally cripple other vendors.
It may seem intentional. I think that Apple only cares about integrating Apple products. This means they launch features which competitors cannot participate in.
Can you blame them? Enabling third parties to act as 1st class citizens means big sacrifices in UX.
Apple believes that great UX is more important than interoperability. Seems like there's a large enough market that agrees for them to meet their business goals - because at the end of the day that's what all of this is about.
I understand airtagging a dog, but how do you fit one in your wallet? Are you worried about misplacing it in your home, leaving it behind somewhere else, or theft? I like airtags and use them myself, but never considered using it with a wallet.
• In fact, the children suggested AirTags — ebikes are expensive. Their only hidden tracking devices are their "LoJack&Jill"-brand subdermal cellular GPS implants for kids, installed while they were under heavy sedation.
• They had phones^H^H^H^H^H tracking devices already, so…
See the link elsewhere for Chipolo. It's killer. I've used it so many times now to find my lost wallet that I'd gladly pay twice the cost.
I was recently existing an airplane, and realized I didn't have my wallet in my pocket. Folks were packing up behind me, and I was getting pressure from my family to start existing down the aisle. I wasn't sure if the wallet was somewhere in my carryon or on the floor of the plane. I was scrambling checking pockets of various carry on bags, etc. The I remembered I could ping it. Within seconds, I could hear the chirp and very quickly found it.
I put an AirTag inside the little pouch/sleeve on the inside of my wallet (behind the cards).
It was a little awkward at first to get used to my wallet not sitting as flat anymore but I got over it. Luckily, I’m not a person who stores months worth of receipts and 20 cards in my wallet like my father, so there’s plenty of space.
I use Tile's Slim tracker. It has the footprint of two credit cards. Sucks the battery is not replaceable, but it's helped more often than I can count.
The moment that apple announced "privacy" as their focus I knew this was going to happen. They don't actually care about user privacy, but rather want exclusive rights to all of your data so that they can sell it for a markup. If you want to sell targeted ads to anyone using an Apple device, you'll have to let Apple do the targeting (and take their cut). Get customers locked into the apple ecosystem, "protect" them from non-apple marketers, and then sell access to the giant Apple userbase at a big cost.
What's really worrying is that having Apple gatekeep advertisers gives them the power to dictate what platforms can get ads vs what platforms can't. Letting Apple decide what platforms/services get their potential ad revenue cut in half is not a good thing.
> They don't actually care about user privacy, but rather want exclusive rights to all of your data so that they can sell it for a markup.
Anyone who seriously thinks Apple are going to turn into another Google or Facebook needs to give their head a wobble.
Look at, for example, their recent pro-privacy improvements to the App Store where developers are now forced to state in black and white what data their Apps collect.
Look at, for example, how pissed off Facebook were with recent privacy improvements in iOS. If Zuck is pissed off about a privacy improvement, then it must be a good thing !
If Apple didn't give a shit about user privacy and wanted to sell all your data, they would have done so a long time ago.
Fact is that Apple has many moats. One of their biggest moats is their stance on the privacy of their user's data. They know that if they backtrack on that, many people (including myself) would vote with their feet.
> If Apple didn't give a shit about user privacy and wanted to sell all your data, they would have done so a long time ago.
They already do "sell", in a very similar way as Google and Facebook does - look at their app store ads for example. Only real difference between Google/FB and Apple is that they process data on device, not on their servers. Sure, it's a huge technical difference, but not that much in terms of business and end users.
Google and Facebook don't sell your data directly, as it's bad business - you want to sell access to customers as a subscription to get big bucks. They have all the initiative to protect data they gather on their servers. Same as Apple has to do that on devices.
There're details to it, but just moving where you process user data isn't that much of a difference to end users - you're still a corporation selling other people ability to show me ads for cribs, when you discover that I'm expecting a baby.
To be clear, it's totally possible for Apple's closed ecosystem to be objectively better for consumer privacy and also a kind of "ad reach" silo for which access is sold at a premium.
And honestly, I'll take it. I have always been OK looking at ads if it funds the tools I use and the media I consume. I have always been OK with some amount of demographic and history-based ad targeting. I have no moral objection to some company gatekeeping advertiser access to my eyeballs and selling that access at a premium, especially if I'm already going to see ads everywhere anyway unless I go off-grid. I have no moral objection to using my demographics and general interests to show me ads for hiking boots instead of kung fu lessons.
I am not OK with companies storing, collecting, selling, etc. my data without my knowledge, consent, or legitimate ability to opt out. If the data doesn't leave my phone and all of the "targeting" happens on my own device, I can think of much worse compromise outcomes.
> I would never have this kind of confidence in a corporation.
Meanwhile back on Planet Earth .....
Going by your argument you should not own any electronic device.
Because you should not be trusting Intel/AMD to make your CPU because they might have put spyware in it ....
Because you should not trust your keyboard manufacturer because they might have embedded a keylogger in it....
Because you should not trust your choice of OS because you haven't personally reviewed 100% of the source code and all subsequent patches for spyware ...
In the end, its about balancing risk vs reward. And frankly, especially in terms of privacy, Apple are far more trustworthy than the vast majority of other options out there.
I don't think "this is a problem for everyone" really precludes both informing people about the problem and hoping there is a solution to the problem. Just because Apple it "better", doesn't make it "good".
I personally feel some sort of regulatory framework around data collection and sales is not too much to ask.
My question is why is it always in discussions about Apple that people come out of the woodworks "worried about their privacy stance changing" and how we need regulatory stuff in place in the event Apple STARTS to be like Google, but nobody is ever in the Android stuff talking about how absolutely terrible Google is on this front?
Because everyone knows this about Google already. With Apple there seems to be some associated belief that it's better, when there's nothing really special about Apple. It's a publicly traded company and just because no one let the cow out of the barn yet, doesn't mean it couldn't in the future. Props to Apple for not doing a Google yet, but like someone said, I would never trust a corporation to put me above shareholder value.
> I would never trust a corporation to put me above shareholder value.
Normally I'd agree with you, but I think Steve Jobs has a long history of not giving a shit about what shareholders say because he was more concerned with delivering the perfect product to customers, so I'd like to think that Tim Cook has also carried this torch too.
Yes they are a for-profit company, I still get that... But everyone has been shouting "Just wait, Apple will become just like Google once they realize how juicy that data is to their bottom line!!" for literally decades, yet... Nothing.
> so I'd like to think that Tim Cook has also carried this torch too.
You'd like to think that. I would too. But even if it's true, Tim Cook will not be there forever either. Publicly traded companies are owned by shareholders who can and will do what they want. The last half century of business is littered with the corpses of once vaunted corporate bodies stripped by investors.
They are nothing like Google and have proven that over time. But they don't need to be because people trust them.
Many moons ago I worked for a large online gambling provider. They worked tirelessly to make their company trustworthy, make their games entertaining, and build relationships with their high rollers. Internally, they had strategies to squeeze as much money from every user as possible without causing distress. It was quite eye opening and I can't help but draw parallels between them and Apple.
The fact that others might misbehave too does not invalidate OP's claim, in that no one should blindly trust a corporation. And let me add, an US corporation even more.
All those counterexamples are open platforms which get tinkered with to no end. Meanwhile, it's the apple platforms that get more and more restrictions per year.
> Anyone who seriously thinks Apple are going to turn into another Google or Facebook needs to give their head a wobble.
To me, anyone stretching over to apologize for Apple needs to give their head a wobble. They are just going for the profit, selling you the lie of privacy. They want to scan your photos, remember. They already gave the FBI the tools they need to unlock phones, and they are of course part of PRISM.
What good is privacy if a single corporation has your health data, finance information, contact lists, shopping habits, address, friends and family, movies, music etc etc etc and then want so sell ad space targeted at you?
It's hardly any different than what Google or Facebook do except it's even more encompassing.
Where would people move to? I think there's a fair bit of room for Apple to get worse on privacy while still being preferable to Android/Windows. "At least they don't sell my data as much as ____".
Look at how they constantly go out of their way to engineer a solution that results in better privacy. Like analyzing your photo library using AI for object and face recognition. Any normal company (read: Google) would just run all that AI in their datacenter. Apple goes the extra mile, to actually run all that analysis on-device, while it's charging. I assure you there's no other reason to go through that effort other than privacy.
If they start selling your data, they'll quickly eliminate the very market share that gives them such power. And why would they want to give up that data anyway? Better to use it themselves. A lot of people will accept the data collection as long as it doesn't go to third-party companies, we have ample evidence for that already.
I share your cynicism in general but not your degree of cynicism. Apparently, when prompted by the new iOS, 96% have opted out of tracking, not 1% as your comment would suggest.
Of course! They do opt out of tracking by other companies. Doing so is free, easy, and Apple encourages you to do it. That does not mean it will translate to opting out of Apple tracking you via the hardware. When it comes to hardware, privacy is far down the list of most people's priorities.
Having a prompt that says "Do you want X to do this scary sounding thing? Or not, and have 0 impact on you?" is worst possible way to do any kind of informed choice.
Not giving the user a choice is of course the worst possible way. If Apple makes it sound scary, maybe because it is? Certainly, the opposite is no better: "Hey, we just want to tailor ads to your lifestyle, mmm, good?"
Au contraire, see 96% of apple users who decided they do not want to be tracked if given the choice. You still may be right about apples behaviour later on, who knows, but your 99% feels somewhat, lets say, unsubstantiated
I truly believe the privacy mission is personal to Tim Cook: it was a much smaller deal under Jobs, and Tim Cook was bullied for being gay in Mobile. It makes sense as a lens to view some of their other choices, too.
I think that's absolutely beautiful and very human.
Correct, and Google makes gigantic fuckloads of money doing that. It's no wonder Apple wants to do it as well. Apple having direct hardware access and aggressively locking in their customers makes this an extra degree worse for the consumer/better for Apple. At least with Google, it's easier to stop using it.
Why would Apple see what Google is doing in ads and want to do that too... Google's marketcap is half of what Apple's is... If anything Apple should keep what they're doing up, because they're clearly doing better than Google.
> They don't actually care about user privacy, but rather want exclusive rights to all of your data so that they can sell it for a markup.
This flies in the face of everything Apple has ever done.
I'm more cynical than most, but I also pay attention, and I find it more plausible that a company run by a very private gay man actually holds privacy as a company principle. That fits the facts much better than the conspiracy view.
Apple has already struck out once in the ad industry because they refused to violate user privacy to compete with Google and Facebook. This time around they've acted to bring Google and Facebook down onto a level playing field.
Since Google acquired DoubleClick, it's like we've forgotten that it's possible to sell targeted ads based on target locations, rather than based on personalized demographic profiles of target users. Being able to target locations impersonally is what initially drew ad dollars to the internet, as the targeting could be more specific than general TV spots or roadside billboards.
There's no evidence that Apple intends to use any personal information at all in their ad targeting, and plenty of evidence that they don't. If it is "gatekeeping," it's a gate that they seem unwilling to cross themselves.
>They don't actually care about user privacy, but rather want exclusive rights to all of your data so that they can sell it for a markup.
Of course not, in the same way that a Bently manufacture doesn't care that I own the car everybody envy, but that doesn't mean he won't make a car the everybody envies, because he does care about selling me an expensive car.
> They don't actually care about user privacy, but rather want exclusive rights to all of your data so that they can sell it for a markup
So Google was evil from the start, back when they were just selling ads based on your search terms and not yet spying on your entire life online and offline?
>Apple has the led the conversation on privacy far before anyone else was.
So they can make more money by selling access to a userbase they withhold from all other advertisers. The notion that Apple cares about anything other than the money-printing ability of their phone users is clearly and obviously wrong.
They've faced down several angry groups of shareholders that demonstrate you are incorrect. Apple as a company has a few values that reduce potential profits, and refuse to violate them.
They should probably have more such values, but they definitely "care" about some things other than printing money.
I'm all on board the Cynicism Express, but you've gotten on the wrong track here. Apple can be a monster for many, many reasons while still operating based on principles of user privacy.
I am not seeing where I suggested that Apple doesn't want to sell more ads, or that they don't care about money.
Yes, it's profitable for Apple to sell ads. They tried once before and failed because they refused to violate personal privacy for ad targeting. It is possible to sell fitness ads when people search for fitness apps, or health ads on articles about health subjects, without violating personal privacy. People are concerned about whether Apple will compromise long-held values because Facebook and Google have worked to pretend there's no difference between selling context-aware ads and selling privacy-invading user-tracking ads. There is a difference, though.
What I'm referring to is instead of coming up with something that could be a game changer organically, forcing it because "We need a big idea now". That has a much higher chance to fail.
I think this is why it’s taken so long to release the VR headset. It’s obviously been functional for years at this point and there are tons of other headsets on the market proving there is at least some demand.
But I think apple is taking it slow and waiting for the right opportunity rather than shoehorn it in at the last second of Q4 to bolster EOY earnings.
Same with the car. I’m more skeptical of that project ever seeing the light of day, but there is no doubt that apple has the resources to bring that product to market if they wanted to, but they’re also smart enough to read the room.
Apologies for the typo, I’m on mobile and editing is more tedious than it’s worth sometimes.
My point was to say that there is a market that is actively being developed and growing every year. No doubt that VR is still niche, but so were Palm Pilots and MP3 players!
I agree with you — forcing a new thing because you need one, will likely always fail. I suspect though that Facebook and Apple both feel pressure from shareholders to show constant growth (although Apple has tempered that expectation somewhat by offering dividends to shareholders). I think Apple has a broader base upon which to find the more organic areas to grow. Facebook instead had a large, but non-paying user base ... perhaps fewer options.
This was a nice, brief informative and insightful blog post.
As a business model I understand what Apple is doing and can register the strategy as calculated. As an Apple consumer, I am not that interested.
Sometime after inheriting a pair of AirPod Pros and an Apple Watch I started to feel strange. Then I booted OpenBSD on my own hardware for the first time the other day, straight into the shell and I feel changed by how brutal (as in architecture, aesthetics) the experience was. I find it distracting even to use my MacBook now. The colors, the textures, etc. I just feel different now.
Apple is offering a lot of convenience, apparently. The watch is convenient. The AirPods that dig into my ear canals and make me mistake audiobooks and podcasts for my own thoughts are…disturbing…but convenient as a Bluetooth headset?
As a consumer and user of these devices I just feel somewhere between recognizing these new conveniences but being disturbed by them and distracted even after some time.
I’ve actually been in the process of doing something similar to what’s described in the Medium article. I’ve tried to grayscale thing out before too but I switch back after some time.
I think what I’m getting out for myself is more so a UX issue? I’m not sure. It’s not a matter of attention span with me specifically. But the look and feel of certain Apple devices as a whole makes me feel like someone who I’d hate to become. I could still see myself using an iPad or a Mac mini or something like that, because I’ve taking a liking for some of the things those devices have to offer for specific tasks.
But I would love for my phone to just be a concrete brick that can spit out thermal printed slips of paper with messages on it as text messaging and emails. And if only voice calls were a distributed mesh of Solo cups and strings.
> Apple devices as a whole makes me feel like someone who I’d hate to become.
Definitely reason enough to avoid them. I sometimes feel nostalgic for the look/sound/vibe of early personal computing. Yesterday I watched this and briefly contemplated how it would be if computing today looked more like AppleWorks and chonky keyboards instead of black mirrors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xtBspMixHk
> But I would love for my phone to just be a concrete brick that can spit out thermal printed slips of paper with messages on it as text messaging and emails. And if only voice calls were a distributed mesh of Solo cups and strings.
The steps they took to squash Facebook and the like (good riddance, fuck them honestly) all of a sudden have terrible optics if they push their own first-party ad platform.
I'm not sure even the most devoted Apple fan could fail to see past that bullshit maneuver. It's one thing to stomp out little players, but when you can crush other giants under your thumb, the monopoly is clear.
The operating system is all that matters, and whoever controls the leading operating systems wins. All the products some of us work on are absolutely useless compared to what the OS can deliver - we're all just services waiting to be swallowed up, ripped off, or pushed out.
You get that ads can exist without invasive personal targeting, right? Ads used to be based on the location in which they were shown, rather than the person to whom they were shown. That's still an option for Facebook and Google, and there's no evidence Apple plans to do anything else.
Never happened? Every search I can think of had an ad covering half or more of my screen (full with the keyboard still enabled). Mostly of terrible low-quality apps you'd rather expect on the Microsoft store too. There's a whole tab for "curated" content.
The whole App Store is one big "ew" experience. It's what you'd expect from other companies.
... and the rest of iOS already shows similar elements. Setting up an iPhone recently I think I saw 3 full screen ads for Apple services. From what I remember it would be a lot more if I used more first-party apps.
What a disappointing way to ruin an otherwise pretty nice experience!
Note that a (the?) primary use case for this is supporting developers who want to create free, ad-supported products using a privacy-first ad network. Is there even another solution for this?
> The numbers aren’t directly disclosed but reliable sources estimate tens of billions of dollars in net revenue
apple is the source[1] no estimating required. all publicly traded companies, required by law. some math is required, many videos on youtube detailing the process. it can be automated, JSON is available. they are called balance sheets, M.shkreli actually has a video series going through these
[1]https://sec.report/CIK/0000320193
I have no idea if "quantified self" is Apple's NBT, a $1T market. I do know that affective computing will be a game changer. And currently Apple's watch is running away with that emerging market.
Long story short: the next big thing is milking/squeezing the existing customers through services. I guess the next next big thing would be charging customers for existing/free features(i.e pay more for privacy, no more on-device storage etc)
Realistically (and I am not singling out Apple here), we are more and more captive of an ecosystem. My Android phone is needed to login to most online service through 2FA, I can pay with it, have my calendar and emails on it.
Losing my phone at this point is worse than losing my wallet and Apple is pushing for even tighter integrations with their customer's life which will ultimately centralize all that information.
If I lost my iPhone (and the FindMy network wasn’t able to locate it), the watch can get me by just fine as if nothing even happened. Oh and this was all setup in a couple of minutes when first buying the watch, so unlikely to be in a situation where the watch can’t adequately take over phone duties because I didn’t dedicate a semester to set everything up and keep it in sync on a regular basis. It’s all automatic. Integrated devices > non-integrated devices all day long. Back to the lost phone; I would then walk into an Apple store when time permits, and get or buy a replacement (depending on Apple care coverage status) phone, enter my Apple ID on the new phone and voila its in the exact state as the old one before leaving the store. End of saga, I go meetup with mates as planned in the evening.
Try to do the same with non-Apple ecosystem or with physical cards and keys. I wish there were (dependable) options, but other large organisations have proven to be utterly incompetent in this area. They have no vision and/or ability to pull off something like this. Or their own actions have made their reputation unpalatable even if they somehow offered it in the future.
Also I hate having to remember to carry five different things every time I leave the house, and feel the sensation of those bulky items moving around in my pocket while walking (Europe, we walk a lot) or running. And I hate having to be limited to trousers/joggers/shorts that have deep enough pockets to fit all those items in, and them falling out while out for a run etc etc etc.
>Realistically (and I am not singling out Apple here), we are more and more captive of an ecosystem.
Yes, we definitely are. But I am not so sure that is a bad thing? And it's nothing new... how many businesses had their entire operations tied to Blackberry, Microsoft, Lotus, etc. for so long? The market might be a little slow, but it's not stupid.
I personally like Apple products and services. I like the integration. I like that I don't have to go out and find third party apps for certain things and hope for the best.
> Losing my phone at this point is worse than losing my wallet and Apple is pushing for even tighter integrations with their customer's life which will ultimately centralize all that information.
The great thing about this is a replacement phone can be loaded almost instantaneously with all your info again. How long would it take to have every credit card company and the DMV send you replacements?
>the next big thing is milking/squeezing the existing customers through services
i am NOT a subscriber to netflix et al. never have been and actively avoid signing up to "trial services" because it could potentially hook me up good.
maybe these people are gullible enough to be convinced enough to be parted with their money, that's fine.
you see, there is "EVIDENCE" in support of cigarettes causing cancer but instead of banning the sales, governments milk it for taxes, the companies say "if someone is willing to pay, why not us" and the blame is on the user.....
the same thing with alcohol and weed and stuff like that. Most of the world has grown around alcohol and even when EVERYONE knows its not healthy for the body, people still consume it, "its traditional".
if people want to not own stuff, want netflix style monthly payments to have their whole life managed by apple, good for these people because then they dont have to pay individually for a bank, for a cable tv, for a cell phone company, for internet, for transport, for education, for security, for netflix, disney, hbo, prime and all that.
yes, that is what i am saying. there are people who avoid smoking cigarettes or take alcohol for all their lives even in the face of freebies. they aren't swayed by them but then there are people who are swayed.
if cigarette makers and breweries can continue and expand their business, so can apple and it would be just the same thing imo
Through the process of using dominant market power, to anti-competitively harm competitors in various industries.
The most common one, that is in the news, is the App Store situation, where literal laws are being passed to ban Apple's behavior.
But it also applies to other parts of their business, such as ads. There could be a push to pass laws to make Apple's behavior illegal in those spaces as well.
Are you aware of the vendor lock-in concept? Combine that with a duopoly and you get your answer about milking and Apple holding a gun to consumers heads.
It's almost a "natural" path for monopolistic companies. Once it got enough market share it starts milking it. Android(google play services) and IOS lock-in is the gun you keep asking for. The whole article is about Apple switching from major hardware upgrades/innovation to charging existing customers more for services.
One simple case is storage. Would would Apple provide you greater storage capacity when they can milk you more using a "cloud" subscription.
I wish huge companies like Apple would just be happy with being #1 in their category, collecting their enormous profits and paying out dividends to shareholders, instead of feeling the need to take over the world.
Those are all improvements to their main product lines. I’m talking about apple car or credit cards or whatever else they’re going to do. If people at apple want to build a car they should form a new company to do it. I don’t want my phone, computer, car, and credit card all issued by the same company.
The iPod wasn't a main product when it was introduced.
Honestly, if Apple wants to make a car, I'm all for it. What I don't like is that they seem to be ditching their hardware innovation in favor of SAAS like all the other tech companies. It's lazy and all with the hopes of surrounding you with marketing.
The problem for me is even if they release a car way better than anything else out there I’m not going to buy it, I don’t want to be so dependent on one company.
I think some of this will be the eventual undoing of some large companies. Take for example facebook; it early on came into a huge market dominance as a relatively simple social media site. Now it's hugely overblown with algorithms trying to wring a couple extra ad dollars out of existing users, at the cost of making the whole platform (imo) a lot worse, and this may be speculation but I think we've reached peak Meta and they will start to lose massive amounts of users and be replaced in the same way they replaced Myspace.
I agree. I wish myspace were still around, it was so much more fun than facebook. Everyone having their own unique profiles infinitely customizable is something I miss. Facebook came around and replaced everyone's cool, unique clothes at the party with boring uniforms.
What I don't understand is, Apple is the most valuable company in the world for a reason. And the reason is that they've developed insanely good and immersive user experiences. And now it seems like they're ready to just throw that out the window in order to compete with Google and Facebook on showing you more marketing content? Makes no sense imo, there's plenty of room for growth in the hardware space
Apple has never been a 'pure' hardware builder. It's always been a systems integrator: hardware, software on your device, closely integrating open source in some cases (Unix / Webkit) then moving to link other devices (iTunes).
It's just extending that integration more widely into the cloud and other services. In some ways its surprising they haven't done more of it already.
The Apple Watch and Augmented Reality facemask for extreme sports wayfinding and monitoring other complications in deep dark cave dive rescue mission are challenging usecases for marketing in the style of Rolex.
> The unacknowledged Apple Car (the “Titan” project), Augmented Reality (AR) devices, and forays into the healthcare market, none of which is a feasible candidate
So wrong. PDAs were replaced by smartphones. Smartphones will be replaced by AR glasses. It is the next big thing hardware-wise. Many new services will be built upon glasses and watches, and many will be health related. You'll still buy a phone - it'll have the battery and the supercomputer powering the other two. I doubt that it will even have a display.
While I’m sure AR glasses are coming and will be popular, the notion that they’ll be so popular that smart phones won’t even have screens is particularly bold.
Smartphones didn’t replace PDAs, most people didn’t have a PDA to replace. Smart phones replaced whole categories of devices and bundled them into one: cameras, camera phones, PDAs, MP3 players, watches, timers, alarm clocks etc.
People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming. The smartphone was a singular event in the history of computing and it wont be replicated within our lifetimes. At most it will be unbundled again, unevenly (eg, smart watches, and glasses)
> People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming.
Or... what if the next big thing is the phone becomes the computer, i.e. there will be no laptops? Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use.
Today it seems impossible or hard to build but I think the bottleneck here is not even the hardware as much as it's software. But that's a long conversation. Just an idea (kind of an obvious one) I wanted to share.
Convergence is something that’s been talked about for a long time, but I don’t see it being something the large consumer companies want to actually drive forward.
Looking at the direction of Apple/Microsoft/Google, they’d much rather sell you more devices and keep your data synced in cloud services than let you own in all in one unit locally, so that’ll probably be the main direction we go in.
The main exception will be in the indie/enthusiast/hacker space with devices like the pine phone/purism units.
The problem you'll run into with this is a mobile CPU is $150 (at most), and the display panel and GPU will each cost more than a dedicated CPU. What you really want is a cross-platform roaming profile, but don't hold your breath for that.
> Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use.
You can do that with Dex on the higher end Samsung phones.
My brief review of it is close, but lacking some finess with the browsers compared to other desktop operating systems.
There was definitely a long-term trend of computer shrinking. Room->closet->desk->lap->pocket, but I agree that future interaction models look completely different, and there isn't an obvious next step.
I agree, from the perspective of what industry creates, but keep in mind that the effect on the consumer space varied throughout that history significantly. There was no consumer room sized computer.
Realistically I think the future is already here with a proliferation of specialized mobile devices. This is why Apple took away the headphone jack: so they could sell AirPods. OP was right in the sense that glasses will be coming into this model, I just differ as to how central they’ll be to the future computing environment.
I’m hoping that there will be a bit of a backlash to the Saasification of consumer tech, with its implications on privacy/control. Though I have to say I’m not very optimistic.
"Saasification" is just one aspect of this risk. The broader category of risk, and one that is harder to ameliorate, is that consumer technology is complex to the degree of approaching - from the user's perspective - magic. Who else besides Apple and a couple of other companies can create this magic technology? The answer, I believe, is "none". Apple fully understands this. They will talk up "privacy" etc. to distract us from the fact that they may become a monopoly provider of magic. I use Apple products and I like those products and in fact I am invested in the company (is there a better moat than magic?). But from a long-term perspective, I see a lot of risk here.
Agree to this. Aan Apple fan acquaintance of mine recently said he might put away his phone because he could achieve everything with his watch and earpods and wanted to increase his concentration. He said he'd do his WhatsApp with voice messages and also call like that. He was fine with no display.
I think the same. When they do AR I believe they’ll do it much better than anyone else. They’ll be some really cool feature that will make people flock to it, like apps on the iPhone.
I was hoping that will happen with the apple watch, but so far it just brings the notification spam to your wrist and does fitness/health monitoring if you care about that.
What will the AR glasses do, bring the notifications that I have turned off anyway in my face?
My personal hypothesis is they're going to lean in to perceptual enhancement. Passthrough AR will allow them to basically apply arbitrary correction and filtering to your vision, so in conjunction with their expertise on photo processing and general AR tech I think the idea will be that wearing these will make everything around you just look and feel better.
Hey I have an idea. Get everyone to wear AR glasses that filter your vision. Then have thieves pay hackers to make them invisible to eye witnesses.
The holdouts who refuse to wear the glasses slowly meet with ... unfortunate accidents. One by one. Until there's no one left who sees the world as it is.
Agreed. I think that the Watch is part of that - get people used to the idea of wearables as luxury items, not dorky like Google Glasses. Then you get a design house to create the frames, use iPhone for computation and extend interactions to the watch.
I agree that we'll see some huge new product by 2025 - not sure if it's a visor or spectacles though.
Apple never invented anything. They always took something that already was nichely popular (Nokia's smartphones, Creative's MP3 players, PCs), then improved upon those things just enough to make them palatable to the masses, logo included. It's not a mystery why they've recently invested heavily in AR and electric transportation: these are two newish hardware things that still badly need to be improved upon. Unfortunately, all the money in the world cannot replace Steve Job's balls, wild flair and decisiveness. Sadly, lawyers and MBAs have taken over Apple since he departed. Other products and things newly invented are just not quite niche enough to mandate an Apple R&D budget. At any rate, Apple's still massively selling to post modern urban peasants, so fear not, they'll be around until the rise of the next great ballsy marketer.
The next big thing for Apple (which they've actually been working on for a while) is ads. They plan on taking down Google and Facebook in one fell swoop. They are the most heinous, disingenuous, evil empire ever.
I always get downvoted when making this comment, I just hope that the "blind believers" of today will remember their mistake a few years down the line when the "privacy" house of cards comes tumbling down.
Its clear Apple are heading down the disruptive disintermediation route.
Look at the Air Tag. Effectively killing off competitors by making use of the global network of Apple devices.
Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.
Or look at the fact they still haven't rolled out Apple card internationally. My uninformed guess is that it is more to do with "something's brewing" rather than the US cards not working.
Their recent satphone announcement. Clearly that's just the start. I think most people are guessing the endgame will be carrier disintermediation. And frankly, given how shit most cell carriers are, I can't wait for Apple to come along and give the incumbents a run for their money.