"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
Apple still makes great products. Nothing can beat a MacBook (especially the new ones), AirPods work pretty well. Many (most?) people that use iPhones or Apple Watches love them.
Hmm apple still makes great hardware but I think software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…
For example on you phone you will get a red alert in settings … when you click it … says Try apple music for 3 months .. or will say setup apple pay … or sometimes say sign in with icloud. (even after declining multiple times)
These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.
Also on Apple Computers and Phones alike it keeps asking to sign in and use icloud. But then gives you only 5gigs of space … not enough to even backup your phone and then tries to upsell a monthly fee for expanded storage.
The software is designed to confuse users into purchasing when simply taking photos. New iphone with 64 gigs of storage 40 gigs free …. user gets message they are out of space in icloud and can purchase more space. They are quite aware that many users are not savy enough to know they don’t need to use icloud at all with photos or anything. Every time you update the phone it prompts you to “sign in” or “create and account”. Again comes off as cheap and pushy.
I can go on and on but money crunchers are definitely at the table with software these days.
I hated upvoting this but you’re right. I don’t use the App Store much anymore, nor Apple News that much even with an Apple One subscription and I just keep coming back to the fact that the only adware installed on my phone—and I’ve checked—is basically the system software itself.
This is a premium phone at a premium price paired up with a range of premium-priced accessories. I know I get more than the value out of these devices than I’m putting in but damn does it feel like Apple isn’t just double-dipping, they’re like quadruple-dipping at least.
There’s the money I paid, there’s the money I pay to Apple for services that I do actually want, which, fair, some things have an upkeep cost, there’s the money I pay to 3rd party developers which Apple takes a cut of, and then there’s the money they’re charging developers to put ads in my face when I do open the App Store. There is such a thing as a value-add, and your example of the 5GB iCloud storage? The fact that this is the base level no matter what model phone you purchase just feels downright cheap, and that’s theoretically shared with a Mac or an iPad or both. Actually gutter-dwelling penny-pinching coupon-clipping lentil-dieting cheap.
I think App Store Search Ads were really the start of this trend. Think from a benefit perspective - do these ad placements help users? No, they lead them to apps they weren't looking for. Do these placements help good developers? No, they cost them money to ensure their own top placement isn't stolen in search. Does this benefit Apple? Of course - now every large developer on the platform is spending boatloads of cash to ensure they get the top result wherever possible. Essentially taxing developers to buy their own app name slot so that some other random company doesn't do it first. And it has the follow on problem of now allowing spam apps to have a voice on the platform - get your garbage ad-ridden, weekly subscription app approved, then just boost it up with search ads. The real problem is Apple still makes a boatload of cash from those scenarios, so they aren't incentivized to stop them.
iAd came before that - but it had a goal of benefiting everyone - users, developers and advertisers. "High quality" ads, privacy focused targeting, developers get a cut and as a result they remove other more invasive ad networks. Unfortunately it didn't work out, and with Tim Cook now at the helm the numbers for search ads spoke a little more loudly than before.
Am I the only one who keeps having problems with iPhones backround music/video play and resume? It's linux level bad. I play something I stop it and I never know what might be playing.
For PiP videos I have to play, lock the phone then press on play and then it might either continue the background video or play music from my library which I never really use.
The other day my iPhone would just reload and I still have no idea why? Did it run out of memory? Screen would freeze and it would stop on a black screen and then reload.
I don't remember these bugs from when I used to use an iPhone, but maybe I just didn't pay attention to them. When I travel and use a travel SIM it keeps asking me to switch everything to the new SIM. Default calls, iCloud, default messages. I say no to all of them but it still switches some of them.
Using apps from two different countries is a nightmare as well.
I do appreciate the speed of this device but ALL of these things are non-issues on Android. Something is off IMHO
I think your phone might be defective. The only time I've experienced random restarts was when my battery on an old 6S was dying. Battery got replaced and all was fine.
Not sure what's going on with the music. I sometimes have it play random Apple Music when first connecting to CarPlay. Outside of that itt fairly reliably removes music when paused from the lock screen after a few minutes which honestly can be annoying, but keeping it on there forever isn't great either.
Are they still using a battery that's too small, just to keep the phone thin, and prevent you from replacing the battery yourself, then when the battery wears out prematurely they throttle the CPU to stretch battery life, which makes the phone slow, making you think the phone is dying, so you just buy a whole new $1000 phone instead, when all you really needed was a $30 battery?
I literally never understood this problem. Yes the battery isn't easily replacable by the user, but literally just pop into any nearby apple store, it's £69 and you get a new battery fitted in about 30 minutes. Are people who say that the only option is to buy a brand new phone just......uninformed? Unable to do this for some reason? I just don't get it. I wouldn't be able to swap the battery in my car either, but I don't go around saying that the only option is to buy a brand new car when the battery dies - I go to a workshop and they replace it. How is a phone any different?
Before they got caught Geniuses weren't recommending $100 battery replacements. They were recommending new phones because the old one was "too slow". And that "nearby" Apple store can literally be hours away.
And the problem is that Apple was considerably undersizing the battery compared to rivals and then compensating by throttling the CPU once it aged.
I've never not had an extremely disappointing experience with Apple Geniuses. Absolutely horrendous support. Completely incompetent people running down a script.
That said, I've had two trusted Apple Premium Partners that I would go to when I was still an Apple user and they were an absolute delight. Unfortunately back then I was living in a major city in Germany with tons of Premium partners, so nowadays that I don't really have a homebase and only have an iPhone I don't really know where to go for competent support.
Sure, in which case at least here in UK Apple will send you a prepaid shipment label and you get the phone back within few days. It still doesn't sound to me like "buy a new iphone" is the better and/or only choice.
Hmm, are you using BT headphones or speakers? AirPods are the biggest annoyance for me with auto-switching as I'll usually have a mac, iPad and iPhone at my desk, be listening via iPad to something then opening a random app on my iPhone will request audio and stop the iPad from playing as the airpods swap devices. I know - it can be switched off, but it has to be done on every Apple device they connect to.
My new problem is with Apple TV and the Dynamic Island. Now by default when I walk into a room where my wife is watching TV, the phone will pick up the proximity and show me the remote as a live activity (Which is great, usually.) Then I use my phone for something and have no sound as my volume is down and the buttons aren't responding at all (seemingly.) It turns out if ATV is in the dynamic island, your hardware volume buttons now exclusively control the TV volume, and the only way to change the phone volume is to go into control center and swipe around.
Ha, I have that exact problem with Android, and I've been considering switching to an iPhone. It's crazy that it's also happening in Apple's ecosystem.
Interestingly, I started getting them after turning on Digital Wellness. The web browser will play audio in the background and even about 10 seconds after closing. It's crazy and drives me nuts.
On my last Android excursion I left because I was continuously plagued by audio issues. I’d cycle 11km to work every day and listen to podcast. With Android I had to stop at least once every day to fix audio issues. I switched back to an iPhone and it has been smooth sailing since then?
The total addressable market is saturated now. Gains from Android are slow and difficult. So continued growth depends on more money from existing customers.
No. That’s the line, that’s the word on Wall Street, but it’s also complete crap. Apple spent a decade and a half as the iPhone company and for a long time that was exactly the right call.
They have other product lines with more than enough room to grow in the market, but they have to hunger for it, like they did from 1998 to 2008 with the Mac, and 2007 through the current day with the iPhone. Almost anything Apple puts out will sell in quantity as long as it doesn’t have exactly a voice-controlled UI, and while Microsoft and Intel are busy shitting the Wintel bed Apple is putting out top-tier high margin computer hardware with obvious gaps on the low-end, the middle and the ultra high-end and the thing keeping Apple from fully capitalizing on that is they’re shitting the bed with their own OS and tunneled in on nickel-and-diming their existing install base.
Apple’s revenue in 2021 was $394.3B, and some portion of that is already accounted for in the Music, Movies and Television revenue for 2021 but if they really want to grow, then they need to go back to their roots: hardware running software of quality. Services will only be a segment and most of their “services” revenue depends substantially on the size of their hardware’s install base. They can still offer those, but if you build good products, the profit will follow. Apple was the one that built their business on that philosophy.
Market share is the wrong thing to look at, yes Apple has a small desktop/laptop market share, but they utterly dominate the profit share.
This is the real question: How is Apple going to fill the gaps you see in the low end PC market, where there are very small profits to be found, without cannibalising it's own high end profit margins?
For the wintel PC makers market share is all that matters because they are all trapped in the commodity sector, so volume is the only way to grow profits. Apple isn't, it's a premium brand, so the economics it lives by are completely different. Analysts have been getting this wrong about Apple for decades, in fact pretty much my entire adult life, and I'm in my 50s.
Commodity companies can afford to stagnate their products, Cocacola makes the same sugar water they did before I was born. Premium product companies cannot afford to do that, they have to constantly invest in renewing and updating their products. Apple has been doing that for almost their entire existence (modulo a period of stagnation in the 90s when the execs didn't understand their own business).
On the software side I don't really agree, yes they have quality issues, but so does all software and they have incredibly complex stacks these days. They're constantly pushing forward with new software features, that's part of the problem, new features means new bugs.
> They're constantly pushing forward with new software features, that's part of the problem, new features means new bugs.
Only if you don't invest in testing - and Apple sadly has fallen to the trap of "bananaware" (ripens at the customer) as well as everyone else. "We ship it once it is good quality" has been replaced by "we ship it as soon as it can survive the presentation at WWDC and fix the bugs later on". For commodity manufacturers this can be excused by low profit margins (even though I don't like it), but Apple could literally double their developer headcount and they wouldn't feel it in their bottom line.
How?
They are just links to original work in other places. Now if you look over all media there is a bias in the US Republicans will see all non Fox as left wing in the UK all the papers are right wing.
I think News looks at what you choose and offers more of the same.
They are biased in the work that they choose to present. Curation is a way to introduce bias as well. Doubly so when you consider that they post the headline as a notification, and most people stop there.
I don't have specific examples, I'm just going off the several times in the past year where I've seen a news story covered in five different ways, then I see an incredibly slanted headline notification from apple news that is woefully inaccurate.
Also, Fox is just the other side of the same coin- left or right wing, when it matters, Fox is no different from CNN. It's all fake garbage. Just wait until you're belief systems or personal experiences don't exist within the mainstream collection of proffered views, and you'll see how fake all of it is.
I hate upvoting this too but it's pretty clear that:
1) advertising does not belong in Settings
2) notifications - especially system notifications - should not be abused for pushing ads
With regard to iCloud - 5 gigs is stingy compared to Google drive etc., but it's more than enough for the most essential parts: iCloud keychain, continuity, and storage for non-media apps like contacts/calendar/reminders (if you use them). The part I object to is using the OS for advertising.
The issue is that a large number of their users have had iPhones for close to a decade now. 5GB worth of photos is absolutely nothing.
I pay the $0.99/mo for extra storage but every time I do it, I wince a little and it costs them literally pennies to avoid giving me a bad taste in my mouth. I wish there was a way to self-host iCloud backups.
The problem is each photo is 5MB. It’s insane. We should have different levels of compression depending on the album it’s in; My meme folder should only contain 200KB images, my parents souvenirs should be 5MB each indeed.
iCloud backups of photos is possible without using iCloud. I use a photo syncing app on my phone that is paired with a SMB server in my home. It just dumps new photos whenever I’m on my home network. But I don’t get iCloud syncing photos to my Mac instantly.
iCloud backups of device backups requires a Mac, then setting to sync via Wi-Fi.
Mine runs in the background when I get home. It uses an iBeacon device to determine when it is home. It starts the photo sync in the background. If I take photos and want to sync immediately I do that by starting the sync in the app. Remotely is a two part process —- enable vpn, then sync.
The ads are super irritating, I can't believe a phone by the company that supposedly cares about user experience is pushing a fucking credit card offer. But that really shouldn't be surprising, considering...
After the casino ads took over the App Store, it became apparent that they're just bullshitting about safety and trustworthy computing. Because why not, if you care about those things, where are you going to go, Android?
Today's Apple is a mercenary bucket of quarterly-reporting driven MBAs. Any brand loyalty or trust I used to feel is gone. I stay logged out of Icloud, because if I don't, things keep uploading... stuff... to them, which absolutely should not happen, but does.
So, Apple is qualitatively no better than MSFT at this point, worse in some ways. At least Redmond does't affect a smirky superior shithead attitude in their software.
> After the casino ads took over the App Store, it became apparent that they're just bullshitting about safety and trustworthy computing. Because why not, if you care about those things, where are you going to go, Android? Ha-ha.
Hopefully they’re at least vetting the casino apps. The only thing worse than shady casino ads are ads for shady casinos.
Not just the upsells, the software is declining in quality in terms of features as well. Both of these features used to work and now don't.
- They removed iPhone sync from Music (nee iTunes), which makes sense, but the replacement in Finder doesn't support directories in file transfer. It shows them, you cannot expand them, placing files in a directory is possible and results in the files becoming inaccessible. Doubly stupid that the working file sync was in the Music app and not in the file management app.
- AirDrop on macOS just hangs all the time. I am completely unable to send files from my laptop and the interface is just a beach ball.
It really gives me hope that Apple is letting Linux play catch-up; I'd love to see a Linux experience that targeted the low-level usability of macOS 10! I'm talking OS-wide support for bundles, proxy icons, unified notifications interface... The target isn't moving any more, so it's reachable.
It’s also a different epoch. 1990 was all the rage about C. But now that a ReactJS dev can get paid 6 figures and move jobs easily in every big city, it’s much harder to find people who are passionate to build APFS or desktop apps for one vendor based in Cupertino.
I would be surprised if there was much overlap between those type of programmers.
The ReactJS type is doing fancy thin gs on screens and does it for the money and for all sorts of places. The APFS builders are more likely to be passionate and look for specific work. But 30 years ago the ReactJS types would be working for corporations using VB but the system programmers would be doing similar to now.
System programmers have always been rare and I suspectr less motivated by money more by having interesting work that affects many people.
>Hmm apple still makes great hardware but I think software wise quality has suffered and this quote applies…
I'm of the opinion that nobody makes a really nice user experience. My #1 complaint on every platform, website, device, OS, and software can be summed up as "Stop doing what you're doing, and do what I want." Computers and software should be tools that serve the user. They need to know their place!
>These are just ads disguised as systems alerts … hurts the experience and comes off as cheap.
I think you're not wrong that they're disguising these ads as alerts. But if it helps the user who doesn't care, or more importantly - doesn't understand - backup their photos for when they drop their phone in the lake will be better off, and overall happier with the whole experience. Save someone's irreplaceable photos one single time and you'll likely have a customer for life. Apple is very good at this kind of thing. People make fun of apple fans as idiots, but... it's hard to argue apple doesn't know their customers.
I mean maybe the software is less quality than it used to be but so is it everywhere else. Software is more complex than it was.
In OSes.. Windows, Android, Linux GUI are all jankier. Apple Music’s closest competitors are all electron-based resource hogs? Safari is still the best mobile browser
I think it only appears that way on an iPhone. I've long believed that there are extremely subtle problems with Chrome and Firefox on iPhone devices that somehow magically don't appear on their Safari browser. Slow scrolling, strange micro lag... somehow on Safari it's better. Yet on my Android phones Chrome and Firefox work smoothly with no issues whatsoever. Also Safari objectively lacks browser features.
This is likely because Apple makes all browsers use Safari under the hood, so Firefox is a skinned Safari on iOS. They do a great job of making it behave similarly to 'real' firefox on other platforms, but where there are holes and weirdness, it's likely down to this.
This might sound odd, but there is an entirely different axis by which to evaluate the quality of a browser than the web developer axis. If you look at the omissions, while there are some things I would prefer Apple to support (e.g. AV1 decoding), there’s also plenty in there whose omission of I consider a feature (basically anything on there that can be used for fingerprinting).
It's not only about features, there's a lot of bugs on Safari mobile you don't really see because basically web devs takes enough time to solve them. I've experienced SVG bugs, z-index bugs, form bugs and even a few dom events bugs to name a few.
Fortunately nowadays I don't need to support this browser anymore on my new company.
There is also two completely different axis for 'feature support' and 'security', neither of which need to be mutually exclusive. WebKit is really not the 'best mobile browser' any more than Microsoft Edge is the best Xbox browser.
Is the Apple Music app honestly much better? The web interface was pretty garbage last time I tried too, constantly stopping for no reason.
And I'd say Firefox for Android has Safari for iOS beat by mile. I can use add-ons like Ublock Origin and no script, plus stuff like background video fixer to play YouTube videos in the background. And I can't think of a single thing it lacks over Safari.
Honestly the only thing it lacks for me is iCloud Keychain but even on macOS. I'd love to have that support + shared history so I can use it properly on desktop and mobile. I know about FF Sync but still I do prefer the iCloud sync.
That being said FF has made some stupid decisions - like the lack of homepage on Android. Like... WAT?!?!
In some cases software quality suffers not because of the inherent complexity but because it's changed for the sake of change.
One example is the Books app that was updated in iOS 16. The update brought some new features but also changed the UI/UX for no reason, making it unpleasant to use. There's no dearth of similar examples with Google's apps too.
I don't really mind having switched to an iPhone when I got one provided because for all the discussion, ios and Android are nearly identical but I miss both Chrome and especially Firefox. Android Firefox has actual uBlock. The experience is miles better than Safari.
I agree on the software. I used to love using iTunes and used it for playing all my music. Then they released the "Music" app on the desktop that just removed almost all the features I loved about iTunes and made the user interface drastically worse.
Also, apple tries to lock with hardware so might, I find it too much frustrating. For example copy paste feature from iphone and mac os won't work if we don't login. And, 2fa is compulsory
Apple hardware is top notch but software is ewwww...
I’m surprised that Apple, as a company that had been carbon neutral since 2020 and had pledged to protect the environment hadn’t banned any use of Bitcoins from their platform altogether.
Crypto carbon footprint is mind-boggling, estimates are 200 million tonnes of CO2 since the launch, not including the CO2 emitted to manufacture the hardware.
Coinbase, that popularised all that mining to the general public should be considered as evil as other large CO2 emitters. And worse, all of these carbon emissions are for nothing, crypto seem only to be contributing to more exchanges crashes, fraud, money laundering and crime. With nothing to show on the positive side.
You are confusing Bitcoin with crypto. Ethereum uses drastically less energy after it transitioned to proof of stake. Many other cryptocurrencies are similar.
Nor do I agree with your assessment of banning Bitcoin because its power usage doesn’t match what we would like. I assume we all somewhat believe in the free market and the free market is solving this problem. Bitcoin price appreciation has been anemic at best and is only about 2% over the SP500 (+54%) in the past five years. Ethereum is quite a different story. +177%. Innovation is working.
How much power and materials are wasted when Apple releases incremental changes with a new number each year to resell the same thing to materialistic buyers annually? Should they ban themselves for the greater good of the planet? I’d say so.
>Assuming the ecosystem was made up entirely of iPhones, an iPhone, on average, weighs 150g and are 130mm long. This means that you're looking at a pile of iPhones weighing 250,000 metric tons (the Empire State Building weighs in at roughly 330,000 metric tons), and if laid end-to-end would circle the Earth more than five times.
And that’s just the e-waste. How much energy went into making them, how many dollars were wasted paying salaries and gas etc.?
Crypto is bound to bitcoin. There is nothing that is holding that house of cards besides the bitcoins. As Ethereum and other coins do not have the cap. And near any investment into crypto contributes to the environmental damage from bitcoins.
You can read Apple’s environmental report. And read the recent publications that analyse the environmental impact of crypto. And one of the biggest moves that Apple and Google can do as companies, to lessen the environmental impact is actually banning bitcoins and crypto.
As someone who cares about the environment, I advocate for it. I don’t have any investments to Apple or Google or Bitcoins. Please, disclose any crypto investments, should you advocate for these.
If you are going down this route, you can also consider the environmental impact of electronics and aluminum production, which takes a lot of energy (and pollutes too).
What are the actual positives from crypto? Had any been demonstrated? I see a lot of positives in having an iPhone. Say, my children can video-call their mom when she is travelling. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that worth the environmental impact, especially considering that Apple is carbon-neutral?
What are the positives of crypto? I haven’t noticed any for 10 years it had been around. Only exchange crashes and hacks like MtGox, Fed investigators having to fight Silk Road and the crazy near-fraud exuberance of FTX and alike.
True, it says "this value is 1.8 times larger than the 205 TWh estimated for all of the world’s data centers combined, which provide society with myriad other information services beyond just streaming Netflix videos."
See, this is your problem. Abhorrent business practices can exist alongside great products, just look at Nestle. Nothing will excuse them for pumping freshwater out of inland lakes, or paying for paramilitary organizations to oppress their slave labor camps. It just means that people are fine eating Hershey Bars without thinking about the child labor that made their chocolate.
So, p0pcult cited with a Steve Jobs quote which, in this context, can only be understood to mean, "Apple is becoming/has become a company where sales and marketing people are running the companies, and the product quality is suffering for it". shepherdjerred points out that the product quality is still extremely high, so the quote doesn't seem apt.
"Apple makes some good products but is evil" is valid criticism of Apple, which shepherdjerred hasn't disagreed with. "Apple is making bad products these days because they are lead by marketing and sales people" isn't valid criticism of Apple (in shepherdjerred's, and my, opinion).
There is certainly proof of Apple's software quality declining in recent years (iTunes, MacOS, Xcode, APFS, Time Machine, oh god the list never ends) but there's a larger point to be made about how regulation can be a salve for our ills. Apple wouldn't need to be fighting this war if they played nice, but much like Nestle they refuse to heed our warning until it's too late.
Apple is at a scale where pithy Steve Jobs quotes don't aptly describe their relationship with the economy or world governments. We cannot trust them to do the right thing, so our best hope for turning them around is holding them accountable for the things we want.
> There is certainly proof of Apple's software quality declining in recent years (iTunes, MacOS, Xcode, APFS, Time Machine, oh god the list never ends)
Can you be more specific of the proofs you are talking about? I've been using Mac for 20 years and haven't noticed issues that indicate a declining trend.
As the GP mentioned there have been great products that Apple introduced in the last few years. So your evidence is wrong, or at most inconclusive, to show that marketing and sales people have taken over at Apple, resulting in worsening products and services.
> but much like Nestle they refuse to heed our warning until it's too late.
The fact is Apple has continued to grow phenomenally in the last decade. They may indeed head to a decline, but I can't see evidence of that. Can you?
Are you confident that you can see the future where others can't?
Unless the defence for iTunes is "it was always crap" then I'd love to see the apologetic claiming it hasn't declined in quality. The last time it updated its UI was certainly a huge step backwards but if I could point at one thing it'd the persistent sign in pop ups any time I open it. I don't even use it as my main player anymore because of how crap it is.
It was a buggy rollout, but they managed to ship an entirely new file system to billions of devices while largely preserving user data. It should be heralded as a software achievement.
That was impressive, the less-impressive part was watching them completely fail to document the filesystem and (still) have yet to release the open source spec they promised. Par for the course with Apple, but still bothersome enough to mention.
Right. And that would be fumbling at the "5" yard line but the opponent touched and miraculously tipped the ball back to you, and you recovered and still made your points (puns intended).
The show The Good Place explores this idea; it's impossible to live a good life because everything in the supply chain eventually has some bad aspect to it.
They didn't block it, they just wanted a 30% cut. Yes it is abhorrent to rent seek 30% of every transaction when you literally contributed nothing whatsoever to that product.
I get why people have a negative reaction and it makes sense.
Then I look at retail where there are several wholeseller adding a %, stores adding a %, drop ship sellers adding a percent
There was a documentary that showed the price of a chicken sold in a store and how much the chicken farmer makes vs the retail price and I can’t say the situation is wildly out of tune with retail or the big SAP/ERP consulting
They want 30% of the Network Fees which are paid to Validators (Ethereum nodes that staked 32ETH to help secure the network). Coinbase never get any of that, it's not their commission etc.
It's more like Apple demanding a cut of your call charges.
The consumer owns one phone or the other, and the switching costs are ridiculously high (in no small part because of other properties of these anti-competitive store licensing models). The average consumer happily can shop at multiple grocery stores, even on the same day as part of the same trip... if isn't even uncommon. The segmentation of users into the ones that own an iPhone vs. the ones that own an Android device should be looked at as creating two separate markets, similar to how if you have a monopoly on groceries only in Wisconsin you somehow aren't considered a monopoly just because your national marketshare is small.
Yes, Android's share is much bigger, but the statement is too generalized to make a relative comparison. While Android has 70+% of global market share, it's important to understand how the users LTV of any consumer business varies based on geo dispersion, hardware price tier, user sophistication and sales distribution model. Apple delivers users that are quantifiably more valuable in every geo.
That said, Apple's monopolistic practices create a ripe oppty for Android to own web3's watershed moment
The equivalent situation would be if the world had two landlords which together owned essentially every single bit of commercial property on the planet (or at least most of the countries) and if you wanted to sell chicken, you'd have to agree to whatever terms those landlords set, which are mostly identical between them.
But it's ok because you have the option of building your own store on your own island and convincing enough people to relocate to your island to buy chicken direct.
If it actually mattered to enough people, they would sail over to that island. The fact that most don't is extremely telling about what people actually want, I think.
(F-Droid is right there. It's relatively trivial to install on an Android device. As is, last I checked, replacing the whole Android OS).
The law mandated phone number portability in 2003. Everything else is buyer beware. Why is the answer not just "Don't get in a contract with Apple hardware if you don't want to be stuck playing Apple's ballgame?"
That’s not what rent seeking is. Apple has a very strong distribution channel, in part because of how trustworthy it is, that costs money to run, so it’s fair they take a cut of sales.
I don't see an issue. If users have a concern, they can use another platform.
ETA: it does seem to be the kind of thing that the market will sort out... If apple is going to build a reputation for being hostile to use as a crypto transaction platform, then Android is just a quick trip to the nearest Best Buy away.
They didn't contribute that, the user already payed for it (and Apple pocketed ~40% of the MSRP). The hardware is paid for, same as the software it comes pre-installed with.
> If users have a concern, they can use another platform.
They can't. Apple locks the bootloader even after purchasing/unlocking the device. It would be nice if we could though!
> it does seem to be the kind of thing that the market will sort out...
No, I think the arbitrary limitation of what you can execute on hardware you purchased will be a bit more of a sticking point than that. At least when we're addressing the single largest corporation in modern American history, Europe seems to agree with me.
Another hardware platform, these days Apple functionally sells computing appliances, not general purpose computers. It's why I recommend Apple to all my relatives who don't want to think about the guts of the machine and I recommend windows or Linux to everyone I know who wants to write their own software.
That's great! Giving me bootloader access has nothing to do with how your grandma uses her iPhone though, at least if I'm understanding your grandma right.
It requires more than zero engineering effort on their part so they won't. It is also, technically, an attack vector... A sufficiently sophisticated phisher might be able to convince somebody to replace their bootloader, but we both know that's not why Apple does it.
They do it because it allows them to capture the revenue for use of their computing appliances and it saves them every headache of having to provide customer support for hardware they sell that isn't running an operating system they wrote.
Serving your use case isn't what they make computers for. Google does though. I recommend switching platforms.
Serving my use case is what computers are. If Apple doesn't make those devices, then why are their devices capable of doing everything I described? They already wrote the bootloader. They already wrote the sideloading code, app sandboxing model, filesystem isolation APIs and even the packaging standard needed to distribute iOS applications. What's the major engineering hurdle they're struggling with, relative to everything they've already done?
I don't follow either. If this refrigerator got an update that started showing you advertisements, you'd want the manufacturer to have some form of accountability that they don't further degrade the experience. Having multiple choices benefits everyone and forces the OEM to not make bone-headed moves. You're arguing that Apple shouldn't do good things because... Apple doesn't care? I already know that. I own many of their devices and experience it first-hand.
> If this refrigerator got an update that started showing you advertisements, you'd want the manufacturer to have some form of accountability that they don't further degrade the experience.
Me personally? I might just let it happen (especially if it goes hand-in-glove with some other benefit, like lower cost). Or if it's too annoying I'll switch refrigerators.
> Having multiple choices benefits everyone and forces the OEM to not make bone-headed moves
That's the business model of the alternatives to Apple. Apple's business model is value delivered through vertical integration. For their end-users, they're building a better product because they own and control the hardware, OS, and software ecosystem.
It's Nintendo-Seal-of-Approval thinking, and it's not inherently wrong so long as there are alternatives (and there are many, just none that have a supported path to using Apple's hardware).
> You're arguing that Apple shouldn't do good things because... Apple doesn't care?
I don't think Apple sees opening the bootloader as a good thing. It increases the ways the machine can be in a broken state with the only benefit to people tech-savvy enough to just use other hardware. And, of course, from a pure-business standpoint, it might kick a leg out from under the money-made-through-vertical-integration stool, which is of concern to them.
> Or if it's too annoying I'll switch refrigerators.
You think that having to switch a working major appliance for another because of a post-purchase update by the manufacturer is an acceptable cost for consumers to have to take on? I assume this is because you think the free market forces always end up optimal in the end somehow, and that regulation will cause more harm than good?
Just the second part in this case. Specifically because the customers for Apple products are those who want Apple making these decisions for them.
People buy into Apple for a certain security that the company does its best to vet the store contents. Stepping on their ability to do that diminishes the product value for the intended consumer.
I specifically buy Apple phones for this reason. I have read the T&C and have agreed that I don't get access to specific things - I don't want to ever think about it. I don't want there to be an option to unlock the bootloader, or change the store. I buy an iPhone for a family member and I'm sure there is no way they get scammed like they used to on Android by installing "the new OS update from their computer but they need this downloader or their photos will get deleted - just go in settings and enable this setting".
I want this lock-in because THAT is what I want. THAT is what I bought and THAT is why I went Apple and not Android.
If someone asks me what phone to get I say iPhone most of the time because I know their needs and that they don't want to deal with headaches. If they need more stuff I'd recommend either G Pixel or Fairphone but they I tell them to do the research.
Other options, such as how the EU is going to force Apple under threat of government force to make changes.
Anti trust laws have existed for a century now. We can make new ones, or use those existing uncontroversial laws to apply to the newer tech monopolies.
If Apple doesn't like it's then they can stop selling their product in every country where this is the law. (So that includes the entire EU, and hopefully the USA soon, as there are laws in Congress being considered right now).
EU antitrust differs from American antitrust, IIUC, because American is couched in harm to consumers while Europe is couched in harm to merchants.
So I can see how the EU might see a way towards saying "Your ownership of the vertical stack makes you a market-maker and market-caller on a very lucrative app market; you bear some responsibility to making that market fair and competitive." This is the same kind of thinking that caused France to crack down on Amazon offering discounts on books that undercut local booksellers because they could collapse the booksellers' guild (even though Amazon's shipping integration means they actually can afford to charge so little).
But in the US, the first hurdle such a case has to cross[1] is "Why doesn't the user and app maker just go to Android if Apple's so bad?" Which, indeed, is the question I'm asking myself here; Coinbase could just jump ship and offer their app only on Android, and then, hey, the Android ecosystem is slightly better than their competition.
[1] ... unless the law changes, of course, as you've observed. I can imagine something coming out of the John Deere tractor "right to repair" angle, though I haven't been following this space.
I mean yes they are - there are so many manufacturers.
With the same argument you can say - open access to every device which will diminish a lot of the security by increasing the attack vector.
Why isn't my TV open or my Xbox or my PS? Why can't I edit the code of Windows is not such a stretch based on your arguments?
Also why should companies be forced to open stuff? They market it as a closed system - maybe respect the consumers who like closed systems. There are options for you - it's other vendors. So you have a choice. But even if you didn't there is no reason or expectation you should have a choice if the market doesn't want to cater.
One possible solution is for apple and other manufacturers to be forced to sell developer devices where the restrictions are minimal or non-existent. That I think will solve your quarrel.
This analogy doesn’t make sense to me. This isn’t a bank transfer, it’s a purchase of a digital artifact. Is Apple wrong to ask for 30% of IAPs in Candy Crush? Because this seems pretty much the same to me.
So what makes digital artifacts (especially those that don't have anything to do with Apple's platforms) different from physical products. Would Apple be wrong to ask for 30% of purchased made through the eBay or Amazon apps?
It seems like it's their product and their right to draw the line wherever they see fit. They risked investing a lot of time and money into a platform that apparently now counts as best user experience. There is no ethical challenge, software developer gets access to wealthy customers thanks to Apple's decades of work.
Then don't use Apple - who is forcing you to build for their OSes? Your customers are there? Well maybe they have made a choice to be there for some reason. Respect that or don't go after those customers.
I have made a choice to use apple because I know all purchases for digital products go through iAP so my card details are never passed to the developer in any way. It makes me sleep better at night. I don't want other options.
I don't want to be offered the choice with 28-27% discount because it will make me share my creds (we know most ppl will choose the cheeper option and I admit I will do so as well from time to time).
I don't need the additional cognitive overhead because some developers are unhappy they have signed up to terms they don't like.
Honestly everyone that complains about the 30% so far hasn't given me a good reason other than greed. It's not a better UX, it's not a more secure option, it's not in my best interest (except the argument it will be cheaper but we all know that if possible most if not all companies will just pocket the 28-27%), it's not respectful of my choice of OS (again my reason is that I WANT the iAP as the only option).
But devil's advocate - It's agains apple's Dev ToS and I don't get an itemised bill showing me a breakdown of how much Visa or MS charge me when making other payments.
I want to know the name of the company to see if they do the same when I make a purchase with a debit card.
I've seen exactly zero apps on Android in the last 5 years. I understand there's a lot of apps infested with ads out there, but why would you install those?
Agreed on breaking duopoly though. I'm pretty hopeful about Linux on mobile these days, there's some pretty big developments lately.
Exactly, so we need to stop blaming the consumer and start making systemic change with regulation. If the largest player doesn't agree to play nice, then it's time that we change the rules.
They are getting worse particularly in the software department. Two that really grind my gears (there are others):
MacOS on Apple Silicon for an extremely long time (maybe it's solved now? 2 years later?) which caused incredibly glitchy, almost unusable cursor movement if you let your battery drain to 0%, then plugged it back in and woke it from hibernate.
Screen Time in macOS is unbelievably, ludicrously, fully broken. Nothing about it works almost at all. Metrics for children don't show up. Web filtering falls open after a few hours at random (presumably because the background services crash). The "site not allowed" page predates HTML5 and randomly doesn't work. You can't block built-in apps like Apple News, the best you can do is set a 1-minute time limit. Tons of IP Addresses and Apple phone-home addresses get blocked on the "allowed sites only" mode resulting in constant popups. I had to pay for Qustodio because it's just useless. Also, it has elementary bugs that are horrifying. For example, the pane where you add allowed websites doesn't remember websites you just added when you dismiss it - so if you open the pane again without a reboot, and add another site, it forgets the one you added last time you opened the pane.
However janky other things might be on macOS, Screen Time with "Allowed Sites Only" is by far the most broken thing on macOS, bar none. Try using it with your younger children and rage in frustration as it crashes-open silently and allows Private Browsing with no filtering after a few hours.
All the children comments to this post are amusing... Some things get worse, some get better, some things depend on the use case.
They all miss the point. The problem with Apple in it's relentless mission of maximising vertical integration, is that you are forced to align with their decisions at every single level, whether it's technical, social or political. "Cult" doesn't do it justice, Apple is has gone far beyond this.
Most other proprietary tech is not like this because the pieces are smaller with some reasonable degree of either interchangeability or combinability. Apple isn't neutral technology it's some kind of political entity. When you sign up, you are handing over all control, which is fine until they do something you don't like at which point your only choice is abandon the entire thing or accept it - I don't give a crap about NFTs, but I give a crap about some things, and I don't want to be part of an ecosystem where I can be pushed around. I don't blame the people who are stuck in it, it's hard to exit something that can define a lot about how you work with technology, they are essentially the victim of a big bully with a very difficult to stomach exit strategy.
tomxor, you may survive us yet. Unfortunately, many of the hackers on this site aren't willing to see the forest for the trees. We're too busy fighting over myopic identity politics to imagine a future without the problems we face today.
The first example is oddly specific. I think you can find flaws like that with almost any software or hardware manufacturer, regardless of monopoly status.
The second example is, I think, a perfect example of what most large companies do, which is to neglect specific features in favor of others. People want to work on the "new hotness" rather than maintain something written 10 years ago by a team that no longer exists.
I don't think either suggests that Apple software is getting worse as a whole. The simple fact that they rolled out an entirely new architecture and it's worked pretty flawlessly (except for some fraction of people when the battery drains to 0 and it hibernates and needs a restart) suggests to me that they aren't just resting and pulling in money based on their monopoly status (which they don't even have in any industry).
There was a time when Apple would release a new version that was basically a maintenance release. And they would squash a bunch of bugs. I think a lot of people still remember this. Perhaps through some objective measure, it’s still ok. But I agree it all feels worse.
I don't know man. I used to work on tons of PPC and early Intel Macs that ran OSX (before iPhone and all that). Those were pretty great machines, and the OS basically just was an OS. No shit software preinstalled on top of it.
The first real shit app was iTunes. And ever since then, the OS has just stagnated while they put more software in to sell music, apps, and cloud storage.
There were plenty of bugs. But there were at least a few releases that addressed these. Snow Leopard is probably the most notable which shipped with no new features. I think I first started on Panther and there was at least 1 upgrade during the PowerPC times that really cleaned things up and improved performance quite a bit.
Which is why I speculate that overall, it might not be better. You had to wait a couple years to get the fixes. Now they probably ship the fixes and new features on a more regular basis.
> The first example is oddly specific. I think you can find flaws like that with almost any software or hardware manufacturer, regardless of monopoly status.
True... but this one has caught me, over and over, and it makes me paranoid of a low battery. Before I just had a lazy habit of not getting off the couch until the battery actually died from 0%. Now I panic the moment it turns red, because the cursor bug quickly makes working miserable and requires a restart for my sanity.
> I don't think either suggests that Apple software is getting worse as a whole.
To me, it suggests they are letting more surface-level bugs get a pass than previously. Before, they might have had poorly designed software once in a while, but not things this basic and easily discoverable.
The Apple TV is a multi-user device with extremely poor multi-user support. Considering how long it has been used by B&Bs it amazes me that Apple has never allowed guest access.
Music App sometimes breaks. It just doesn't play certain sections of some songs, even on replay, closing the app doesn't help; a device reboot is required to play songs in their entirety. And this happens on both devices that are connected via hardwire as well as wifi/LTE.
Considering Apple's revenue it is ridiculous how long bugs persist in their applications.
I can't speak for the original iTunes (I used it but not heavily and too long ago to remember), but I've been a consistent user of iTunes between Snow Leopard and Monterey and my experience is that it's gotten worse with every release. With Music being the worst iteration yet, and significantly worse than the last version of iTunes I used (on High Sierra).
I actually have a whole laundry list of things I consider regressions in the Music app, but I'll just regale you with the most frustrating one for my use case:
If you use Home Sharing with wired headphones, it works. If you use wireless headphones with a local music library, it works. If you use wireless headphones and Home Sharing, it does not work. The program refuses to play anything. This was a nice surprise when I first tried to use Music after getting this laptop.
(I'm actually really curious if anybody else experiences this behavior -- anybody reading please chime in if so!)
Yea I don't get this either. I find while maybe lacking some features, a lot of their applications work either just fine or great. Apple Maps for example, the Podcasts app, many others.
You have to be kidding, right? The Apple Podcasts app is widely considered one of Apple's worst - and before Apple started playing "rating pop up" shenanigans, it was rated only 1.8 stars on the App Store.
Before iTunes, I think the OS was great. I think iTunes was the catalyst that pushed OSX down the priority list.
Once they saw they could make money selling music, they started focusing on that and pushing that POS down your throat. Then when they finally realized they could sell apps on iPhones, that's where the focus went. The OS has stagnated since then, IMO. Their bread and butter has been selling apps, music and cloud storage, and it's clear (IMO) that's where all the actual development focus has gone.
Also the e-mail client is trash. It is supposed to support MS Exchange, and my co-workers and I used to use it at work just fine with OS 10.14. It was an awesome replacement for shitty Outlook. Once 10.15 came out, it would quit syncing, freeze up, stop sending email, etc. This was not just once in a while, it would literally quit working almost immediately. I was forced back into Outlook again. It felt like they never tested it with Office 365 even once. But of course, their own e-mail services work fine with it.
That's a weird one. When you say it brings it down, what do you mean is actually occurring? I have a USB ethernet adapter in use on my M1 MBP running Ventura as I write this, and it's been completely fine. But if there's a gotcha out there lurking, I'd be interested to know what triggers it.
We actually had a very similar issue in the office but maybe a bit different. From time to time an entire part of the office would start having slow internet or almost no internet. Took us a few months to fix (it wasn't really on the priority list and was super random when it happened).
Turned out that it happened when one specific USB-C dongle with ethernet and PD was left powered on but not connected to the computer (I think there were other preconditions as well like it was powered-off and you connect power to it but not a computer to it).
The device will then decide to go into DHCP server mode and start sending advertisement packets and the switch would start broadcasting them, the internal firewall would see this and start blocking the switch and in turn turn off the AP that was connected to it so 26 ports would be offline essentially.
Most of us were on wifi and everyone who was on an ethernet (3 ppl) would go "FFS internet is unstable again. Stupid switch is probably buggy", disconnect their cable and go on wifi. Plus they never really reported it as they had work to do and Wifi kinda worked so not a big issue.
It was just a really cool moment when we found out what caused it and we fired up Wireshark and looked at the traffic and we were right. I haven't had a moment of so much joy in a really long time.
That is fascinating, thanks for the link! Hopefully I'll remember that if either of my USB/Ethernet adapters seems to be related to a network problem. Sometimes I think USB-C hubs are simultaneously the best thing ever, and the bane of my existence. I'm finally happy with the CalDigit one I use now, but it took a couple attempts to find something that didn't have some glaring problem. One of my MacBooks just uses a plan USB->Ethernet adapter successfully, but that's because I don't need it to do anything more complicated.
I don't think it would be since that mentions the bug is when it's connected to everything but a computer and mine's the opposite. Everything is fine except when it's connected to the laptop, could still be the same bug though.
I haven't seen mine lose Internet entirely, but I have seen it randomly switch between the two Wi-Fi networks I have set up where I live. I eventually got frustrated with this and then told it it can't automatically connect to one of them anymore.
Likely that it is related to Bluetooth as well. Especially if you have AirPods connected. I noticed the wireless connection quality degrades significantly when the device is connected to an AirPod.
A lot of folks are disagreeing with you in the replies but I actually agree with you to be honest. I recently got a new Macbook Pro after my old one unexpectedly died and there are a lot of things in Monterey that I find highly annoying relative to the last version I was on (High Sierra). I complained about Music in another reply.
One thing that really annoys me that I don't remember from High Sierra is this weird "overbounce"/"overscroll" functionality. This drives me absolutely nuts! Preview does this for example, and actually so does Firefox (but you can disable it there).
If you open up a PDF in Preview, set the zoom so that a full page width is entirely within view (i.e. no scrolling needed), then scroll a bit to the side anyway, you'll see what I'm talking about. The viewport moves even though the full page width is in view. I've found that this triggers even when I'm trying to scroll down, resulting in a weird, glitchy scroll feel.
I feel like I should temper the bad with the good a bit though. For example I have not had Bluetooth fail randomly with this new computer, whereas it failed quite a lot on my last one -- often requiring a reboot to fix.
Similar frustration and mind boggling for me when I found that the "custom focus" feature on iOS just does... nothing. It's a feature where you're supposed to be able to select which specific apps can send notifications to you, so I made one which allows Slack to come through (for work) and blocks everything else. Instead, it just allows everything through as if the "custom focus" wasn't enabled at all.
I just switched to iPhone from Android after 10+ years on Android.
iPhone is everything that I expected Android to be, but has failed to become. As the smartphone market has matured, iPhone and Android are essentially at parity in functionality.
Android is completely fragmented and isolated. Every brand is pushing their slightly broken version of their integration. Everything is buried behind clicks/apps/configurations. I've been amazed at how well my various Apple devices integrate and how well they optimize for the flows that I care about most.
For example, using the AndroidTV remote requires closing your current app, pulling up the app launcher, scrolling to AndroidTV, waiting for the app to load, waiting for the app to find devices, pick a target device, wait for the device to load, try to use a half-assed AndroidTV app. Switch back to whatever app you were using before.
By contrast, iPhone places it in the command center. Pull down from anywhere, click the remote-icon, boom, control your TV. Doesn't even mess with your current app.
> By contrast, iPhone places it in the command center. Pull down from anywhere, click the remote-icon, boom, control your TV. Doesn't even mess with your current app.
It's exactly the same on Android - pull down the notifications shade and click on the TV remote icon.
I will vehemently disagree. I've owned multiple iterations of MacBook Pro laptops over the last decade. At least 6 different, top tier, variations including Intel and M series. They all have had glaring flaws. From garbage keyboards to excessive CPU utilization. My current 16" M1, with 32GB of RAM's keyboard is still a joke for as premium as Apple claims it to be and external video, even with Thunderbolt, is still riddled with quirks.
Is it good hardware? Yes. It's pretty. It's manufactured well. But to me it's basically akin to a Porsche skinned car with a motor & transmission from a US manufacturer circa 2001. It just isn't as great as everyone makes them out to be. The M series is a huge improvement, but if I'm spending my personal money I'm not plunking it down on any Apple laptop. I get far more bang for my buck with shopping out a top tier Lenovo quite honestly. They're not perfect either but I've recently invested in a new T series and handed down a T470 to a family member. Over the course of that time I've replaced one of the two batteries (in less than 20 minutes) with common tools, I've upgraded the RAM, I've upgraded the NVME and I've upgraded the wireless. All making the laptop faster and more relevant. Sure, Apple wins hands down on the convenience ecosystem. But to get things done and build things the Lenovo is my choice all day long. I don't need a Retina screen and I could care less if a pair of Airpods connects to it.
If paying the premium is worth it for those frivolous things then great. But I'm sick of the hardcore shilling of Apple as a serious work machine. Sure if you're doing A/V - I get that. But besides being better on power consumption (I still get ~7 hours out of the T470) there's no draw anymore for me. The software ecosystem has taken a huge hit over the years in quality on OS X and Apple has made too many breaking transitions for me to trust their hardware with my dollars anymore.
Finally, privacy. It's clear at this point Apple's position on privacy is a marketing effort and little else. They do just as little as they really need to make it feel "better". But Apple doesn't much care about privacy but would rather control the walled (with dollars) garden.
To clarify I'm not running Windows on my personal hardware.
I think there's something to be said about the general appreciation on Hacker News for the ARM MacBook. It's sounds like you've had a bad experience.
Some of those things (e.g. 'garbage keyboard') are subjective. Others, like high CPU usage and external video issues, are things that most don't seem to run into. I'm not saying that excuses the problems or invalidates your experience, but I hope that you can acknowledge that most people don't have that problem with their MacBooks.
I agree that the software side of Apple products in general aren't great. There are so many issues.
Run `xcode-select —-install` on your terminal. It’ll install the Xcode command line tools only, no apple account required. I’ve used multiple macs at work and never sign in with an Apple ID on them.
That sounds unpleasant. Hasn't been a problem for me, however, my work laptop is managed 100% through our corporate IT folks, including the Apple OS updates and packages. I've never needed a personal Apple ID to get Xcode.
Nothing can beat a macbook at what? I literally can't think of one thing. Maybe battery life? Maybe? It's surely not compatibility, long term support, reparability, or performance per $1.
They dropped support for every graphics APIs except their own. They launched a greenwashing campaign that is always out of stock of parts, updates are mandatory regularly regress performance on old hardware, and we all know you're paying an apple premium for the same performance as something 60-70% the price.
They used to define good build quality, but most laptops are pretty sturdy these days.
While I haven't used every laptop out there, the Macbook track pad is the only one that I have used that has not made my fingertip skin hurt after a short time of use.
I know this is a little weird, and I have never talked to another person with this problem, but all of the cheap plastic ones, strangely textured ones, smooth-yet-somehow-massively-friction ones all make my skin hurt. The Apple one doesn't for whatever reason.
I think I had a Gateway laptop a long time ago that also didn't heat my fingers to temperatures comparable to the surface of the sun or cause me pain to use. Like a really long time ago.
I go to the local store and try out track pads every so often (like once per year maybe?), and they are all just shit. That's enough to keep me buying Macbooks for now.
Like I said, this is a weird issue that I have never known anyone else to have, but it is a pretty critical one for me.
Also, I just want to point out, that I only mean the materials of the track pad itself, not the drivers or anything. I have no complaints about e.g. Linux track pad drivers. I put Fedora on my wife's Surface Pro 8, and the track pad drivers there are fine, for example.
You're not evaluating laptops holistically. You can always find something that is lighter, runs faster,or has a longer battery, but right now it's tough to find any laptop that can compete with the current crop of MacBooks in all these metrics at once. The only place Apple really falls behind some of the competition is repairability.
My iPhone hostname is Capitulation because I reluctantly switched back because Graphene is worse.
I miss ssh clients that don't Philip K Dick me. I miss syncthing. I miss being able to use non-Apple services to sync my photos. I miss being able to run any apps I want from the web without identifying myself to a vendor. I miss NewPipe and I miss background apps and I miss basic local mp3 players that don't report what I play to remote parties against my will.
The cellular Apple watch has a terrible flaw. The networks only support it on the premium feature post paid contract plans and not on any prepaid plan. There’s no way to have a prepaid cell plan and add a watch for yourself. It’s an awful user experience. This limitation has no logical reason other than short sighted cell company greed and lack of Apple pushback
Honestly, the current status of iOS is sh*t. I left macOS and am doing my own Linux config because I found it's actually a better experience even if I suffer config hell from time to time.
I need my phone, however. Some stuff like having a Google maps with GPS are very valuable. Being able to join a meeting call while still going out is also another advantage. Then you have a bunch of apps that now I can live without but don't want to (like Apple Pay, Banking Apps, Taking a photo...)
Point is: If there is an alternative, I'd switch immediately. And please don't suggest Android as that is Apple with extra-messy-steps.
I'm a Linux guy, not an Apple fan. But the hardware is always top notch. If you look at the MacBook: the trackpad, the sound, the battery life, the overall quality, ... I haven't found any laptop hardware that comes even close to it.
If you know a product that does, please let me know so I can buy one and run Linux on it :).
To me it’s the same conundrum as for the iPad: the hardware is really well made, but it stays very conservative on the form factor, and the software doesn’t take full advantage of it.
For the iPad it’s obvious, for the mac:
- third party OS support non existent (Asahi linux is good, but nowhere near completion), no dual-boot for windows anymore
- unix compatibily has fallen behind with the Apple Silicon move
- GPU capabilities unavailable for existing windows/Linux frameworks (gaming and ML impacted)
- kernel extensions getting deprecated impacts many hacks that were QOL improvements
- no touchscreen (you may want it or not, but arguably it has potential for use)
- no flip screen (goes hand in hand with the touchscreen)
They could solve these in the near future, and none of these are individually deal breakers, but cumulatively these are enough limitations that a worse hardware platform coming with better software becomes a viable choice in many cases.
Personally I’m planning moving away to probably a Chromebook + linux or windows laptop when my current setup finally dies.
I have a Dell XPS from around 2018 that I run arch on. Only issue I've had is needing to replace the battery once due to swelling (very easy to swap), but otherwise the hardware and specs are on par with my work assigned Macbook.
I have had a few dell XPSs, newest one was a 2019 one and they work, but they were not even close to the quality of the full macbook package. The keyboard was dogshit, the webcam didn't work on linux, the mic picked up huge amounts of fan noise, finger print scanner didn't work on linux and the maintainers of the open source drivers believed the hardware to be critically insecure so there is no reason you'd want it supported anyway.
You could upgrade the ram on the 16" versions though which is nice. Although this is still not something I have ever done on a laptop. The new Macbooks now have easily replaceable batteries which is a welcome change.
But how does it feel to use? On my MacBook Pro, the trackpad and keyboard feel like I am manipulating text and windows at the speed of thought. On my work-assigned Dell, with specs ~matching my MacBook, it feels like there's a hidden friction to everything I do. Like going from skating on ice to jogging on sand.
I have never noticed any friction when performing any task on my XPS. I will admit I'm not a Mac/Apple guy myself, so for me it's the opposite (I'm much slower on my work Mac than doing the same thing on my personal Dell)
Had a 2019 16" XPS and I'd describe the keyboard as borderline unusable. It was weirdly squeaky and if you hit a key on the edge a bit it just wouldn't register so I had so many typing mistakes.
Apple hardware is only top notch when you limit yourself to apple's walled garden of software and peripherals. The hardware (and software) is over-fit and has proprietary processes that make otherwise simple hardware tasks on most platforms impossible in an apple latop. The M1/M2 processors are great, but don't try to change the SSD or run an external monitor in an apple laptop.
Agree. I have so many problems with my Mac Mini it is by far the worst device I ever owned.
- It randomly disconnects bluetooth for 30-40s. Especially annoying during calls. When your headset & keyboard stop working and you don't have a way of make anyone know.
- The processor goes full throttle out of blue. Makes my fan go 100% for good 5-10 minutes.
- From time to time it refuses to wake up my monitor and I need to force shut down it.
I have a Dell monitor with a mouse connected to it. I can connect my Linux laptop with a single USB3 for monitor, mouse and power. The MacBook does the same.
Lucky you. It works horribly for me - any time the screen is locked (corporate policy locks it after a certain period of inactivity) the OS forgets all about the external screens.
When I unlock the machine, all my windows are on the internal screen.
There's a setting somewhere along the lines of "each display is an individual workspace" that "fixes" the issue by making each screen an independent workspace, which still won't remember where the windows are.
Nothing beats the keyboard on Thinkpads. You can also get insanely good warranties on them. X1 Carbons match Apple on build quality, displays and price. Apple probably wins on performance, sound and battery life.
Happiest I've been about a computer in a while was when they backtracked on the things they'd removed from the MBP and put them back. Combined with the M1, it finally became the first MBP since 2015 that I thought was an actual improvement over all previous versions.
Now if they can just put a fucking headphone jack back in the iPhone, kthx. Batteries are getting denser, mainboards are getting smaller, phones are bigger than ever... but no room for a headphone jack! I guess they just want to sell more AirPods.
The interesting thing that I have found happening is that I just don't listen to music/podcasts on my iPhone much anymore. I don't at all when I am out anymore, and I only do at home when I can have it on speaker. I guess Bluetooth'd to my car once in a while. That's about it. I wonder if/assume that the profits from Air Pods bought by everyone else makes up for the loss in music purchase from people like me? I dunno...
Apple is still one of the best, but it is not immune to this (others are worse).
Just tonight my phone updated, and the time now looks completely different.
Small rant ahead.
In the last updates they changed how alarms are set (rotatory dial to enter the numbers one by one and back to rotatory dial next update). Why did they change that? I believe just for change sake. Also I could see if I had an alarm set at a quick glance (next to wifi indicator top right); now it only shows on the lock screen. I wish they would let it be or hid it under a configuration option, but that goes against Apple minimalism.
Don't get me wrong, Apple is so ahead of other companies. I think until more companies rise to their standards they won't polish these issues, since they face no competition. But they are not perfect.
My mother also can't use the redesigned alarm easily and is now forced to ask Siri (which always works great!). She's legally blind and can't see red and black contrast. What a stupid design from Apple that can't be changed. I'm convinced Apple's accessibility team is either for optics or is full of people that have never met someone with a disability.
Depends on what you need vs how much money you have.
Outside the US it's far more common to see Android phones and PCs. If you make 1k per month, buying a 1500$ phone makes less sense.
Don't get me wrong, I love my Air, but my big Windows laptop can do different thing. For music Logic alone is worth buying a cheaper Mac. But good luck gaming on a MacBook air vs a gaming laptop. Both cost the same price after all
But that gaming laptop will have your back in serious pain if you carry it every day around a college campus.
When I was younger I had the most fantastic time installing Ubuntu on a Chromebook
Dunno, maybe? I personally am reasonably happy with my new ryzen-based thinkpad. If nothing else, the macbook has so little ports and everything needs an adapter.
> Nothing can beat a MacBook
You can't upgrade the RAM, it has a weird processor that tons of code won't run on, and it starts at $2K. I have the latest one sitting on my desk right now from my work and it is a useless brick that I can't do any actual work on because so much code we use simply won't compile on it. I use a mini from 2018 for actual work and the macbook runs teams and zoom. Complete joke of a computer.
Macbooks and iPhones really aren't that great. There's some sort of mass delusion going on.
Macbooks are just overpriced basic laptops. A lot of people just use them to run Linux software but it's way worse than running it on Linux. Performance is great if all you're doing is video editing, which is what youtube reviewers love to focus on. For the rest of us, it's bleh.
I think that nothing today can beat the M1/M2 CPU/GPU, but a ThinkPad, in my humble opinion, is much better than any MacBook (again, not counting CPU/GPU):
- mate screen
- trackpoint (if you haven't used it you don't know what you are missing)
- keyboard
- carbon body (much more warm than the metal unibody).
I would love for apple to license the M1/M2 to Lenovo.
I think the sweet spot is a $600 lenovo (or other brand). They have a reasonably good screen, 16GB of RAM, a good gfx card (gtx3050), if you need one.
I find it really difficult to fork out an additional $1500 for something marginally better (and in certain ways more limiting).
I've used android for a few yesrs and ios for an year. I can confidently say that iphone has much much worse ux than a stock android. Every standard action 5 additional clicks, devices have much less battery size and life, doing anything in general is a pain in the a*.
My experience is that ios feels a lot like Niagara if you use the app library. Applications are pretty much the same. Notifications are marginally more annoying on ios but only marginally. I miss some intents, Firefox and Android clients are better on Android. The Apple watch is a lot better than the Android offering however.
All things considered, it wasn't much of a change. Ios and Android are not particularly different.
Companies that get complacent and lazy tend to get eaten by competitors, even if they are fat-cat monopolists, eventually. Apple knows this, I think, which may be why they keep on making pretty good products. Although, to be fair, they are not monopolists but part of a duopoly.
They are really good compared to whats out there but they are far from excellent in many details. They are still quite far from Microsoft where almost every detail is atrocious and only the whole is making the cut because the sum of the parts is quite terrible.
iPads are also the class leader in tablets, there really isn't anything close.
The problem is all of these product lines were likely already in R&D during the Jobs era (With the exception of maybe AirPods.) Not the current designs of course, but the ideas. I think the real test will be this upcoming year and the supposed launch of the Apple headset, as I don't think there will be any greater test of Apple's current design/marketing/hardware/software prowess. People are already sour on the idea of the "metaverse" so it'll be interesting if Apple can sell something new/different/useful in the space.
MacBook is twice the price of comparable hardware in a Dell or Lenovo. I mean it varies based on models being compared, but when I bought my laptop last year, that was the price difference. I like Macs, but not enough to justify that.
Unfortunately, none of that is true. Apple hasn't made a product worth owning in a long long time.
Macbooks no longer can run Windows and don't quite run Linux yet (the two largest OSes in the world, and Linux On The Desktop(tm) is a bigger market share than OSX), iPhones still can't run Android after all these years (the majority phone OS), and Apple Watches suffer the issues all the smart watches have (no real good use case, battery lives of a day or less, violates "zero distraction" ethical concerns, sensors are fulltime uploaded to the cloud and there are no good Federal controls on personal data in the US, etc).
I see no reason to ever buy Apple until they actually catch up to the rest of the world. Apple is a cult, and a very expensive one to buy into.
Defining a phone as worth owning as "being able to run android" is very arbitrary. I believe that nothing but the iphone is worth owning because the other's can't run iOS yet. Android just isn't suitable for real world usage yet.
Hand me an iPhone, and I have zero clue what to do beyond the superficial launcher similarities; I'd have to Google anything that's not immediately obvious. Android is simple to use because it already uses the semi-universal UI language that all other OSes (Windows, Linux's gaggle of DEs, ChromeOS, etc) and apps use.
The only people I know that own iPhones IRL are older people who aren't tech savvy (and all of them admit they don't know how to use their phone, and only make phone calls, text messages, and Facebook shit with it); I don't know a single Gen X, Millennial, or Gen Z (in or outside of the tech industry, in or outside of the US) with one.
If Android is "not suitable for real world usage", then no phone is.
If like 50% of people use iPhones, which they do, how can it be possible to not know anyone young who uses one? Just doesn’t pass a common sense test to be true.
How does that change if the majority is small or large? Like 1% or 10% what difference do you think that makes?
> The only people I know that own iPhones IRL are older people who aren't tech savvy
Where do you live? Overwhelming majority of tech people I know in the US and UK use MacBooks and iPhones. That’s academia, systems programming, web services. Very very rarely see anyone using anything but macOS.
Probably a developing country. In the US iPhones have almost 100% market share among young people. I'm in Australia and almost everywhere I have worked has been a Mac place. Schools also all use Macbooks unless they can't afford them.
Most of the tech people I know have long since dropped Apple because of death by a thousand cuts. If you would have asked me even 5 years ago, I would have said half of them still belong to the cult of Mac, but not anymore; the only ones remaining are non-tech older folk.
A lot of HN's userbase lives in the silicon valley and the SF area, so maybe this is just a rather narrow focused regional thing? I only ever hear of cult members living in either the valley or SF, or alternatively, in Seattle, hardly anywhere else.
The proportion nationally is literally over 50%. They can't all be older people - that just doesn't factually add up, does it? You must be living in a very strange bubble, completely unrepresentative of the rest of the country.
The reality is most people with a phone use an iPhone. Any tech or academic conference I go to, most people are using MacBooks.
The people I know who used to only buy Macbooks have switched to Surfaces or those Dells and HPs that have milled aluminum bodies like Macs; and now, recently, I know several that recently bought Frameworks (and love them).
Are you sure you aren't just confusing all the milled aluminum laptops with Macs, and all the black glass slabs with iPhones? I've even had someone confuse my OnePlus as an iPhone (until I showed them that I didn't have that giant ugly notch that iPhones have; apparently running Android wasn't a big enough hint to them).
I don't know how they qualify those results; they don't publish anything resembling scientific work. Like, how do they counter-balance that Android users need to replace their phones less often? Apple users usually buy the new phone every gen, instead of every 3rd or 4th gen (Apple screens and batteries tend to die quickly); so, it seems active Apple users should be 1/3rd or 1/4th of active devices, not half.
Sales in of themselves don't mean much if you're comparing Apples to oranges (ahem) with a disposable phone vs one that isn't.
You are also saying on one hand that most iPhones are purchased by older non tech-savvy people while at the same time claiming that those same people buy a new phone every generation. That is hard to believe.
> Apple still makes great products. Nothing can beat a MacBook
I have quite a few computers on my desk these days.
* Late model Windows laptop
* M1 MAcOS laptop
* iPad
* Android phone
* Raspberry Pi
The point of telling this story is the computer with, by a long distance, best development environment/tools is the Raspberry Pi.
As for user experience, the Windows machine is not too bad, the iPad and Android phone are horrid limited little things. I prefer the Pi, but I can recognise the quality of the MacOS environment. My taste is with the Raspberry Pi. Especially because I can turn of the (fucking) GUI and use it in true text mode.
I learnt programming on the then magical Macintosh computers 1989-1992. They were really something technologically. So far ahead of anything else within ten times the cost.
Those days are gone for Apple. Thank you for the memories.
> best development environment/tools is the Raspberry Pi
The best development environment for _you_ is the Raspberry Pi.
Most people are going to want a GUI. Most users (even the vast majority of developers!) are not comfortable using a terminal 24/7. Most are going to be using whatever IDE they learned on, or whatever their team uses. That's certainly going to be a full GUI IDE that is resource-hungry. Even not considering those aspects, just compiling code takes forever.
I've tried using a Raspberry Pi before as a day-to-day device. It works okay, but you're going to miss speed quickly
Honestly, the Pixel Buds are better than the AirPods. So it's not a guarantee that Apple makes the best products. However, I do like their phones and laptops better.
Apple routinely has 90%+ of the laptop marketshare for computers that cost $1,000 or more. Seems weird to compare their marketshare to markets they're not competing in.
Apple laptops are not invisible or unknown to buyers, and customers overwhelmingly choose non-Apple laptops, as shown by the sales numbers. I don't get what we're disagreeing over. Or is it the case that secretly everyone wants to purchase Apple products but they just don't have the money?
their hardware is good and the ecosystem is good, but their software is god awful. macos has essentially zero window management to speak of and it's refusal to adopt vulkan has siloed it off from the rest of the industry. if they would just stop being stupid and adopt vulkan they would pick up support for a large number of games for free. it also has really bad multimonitor support.
While you responded factually, it feels disingenuous to portray an Apple computer as a capable gaming device. It is not. Not for the newest, not for the best. Not for the classics, not for the indies. Streaming has failed to impress the market, and the Apple Arcade remains an unfulfilling curiosity for those who think of gamers as a bit stinky and unproductive.
On the other hand, having both Windows and Mac, I probably use my Mac more often when it comes to gaming. At the very least 1:1. Or 1:1:1 if I include my iPad.
Some of the games I play on Mac: Slay the Spire, Civ 6, Through the Ages, Nova Drift, Wizard of Legend and quite a few visual novels/text based games.
the most popular results on that website, require emulating windows or game streaming.
from personal experiance the mouse movement in almost any game on my m1-pro before i sold it was borked, and even 'native' games that were supposed to work didn't feel good at all
tabbing out of counter-strike go usually froze my macbook requiring a restart
the ergonomics of the laptops are generally also poor (keyboard is flat, glossy screen, limited angle on the screen hinge so it requires serious hunching )
I mostly play strategy games like Civilization and Stellaris. Sometimes Factorio and League of Legends.
I replaced my gaming desktop with the $700 entry-level Mac Mini that came out in 2020; it had the same hardware as a MacBook, just a different form factor. It worked well. I wasn't playing at high graphics, but games worked well. I went back to my full desktop after a few months because I wanted better graphics.
My Mac Mini only had 8 graphics cores on the base M1 with 8GB of RAM. If you bought one of the newer M series devices I think you'd have a pretty good experience if gaming isn't your top priority.
> Does it have Excel with macros?
Didn't Microsoft do a full port of Excel in the last year or two?
I disagree. While they may make decent products, the quality and attention to detail has gone down. Especially the UX has gone downhill entirely. Look at how bad the wallpaper changing UX is on iOS 16 for example.
However this is not Apple products. This is other peoples' products. For example, other peoples' software. Following the "tech" company playbook, Apple is simply acting as a middleman. And in this case a 30% tax man.
Is the volume of crypto transactions rising. Coinbase announced something about increased volume back in September. Perhaps those sales and marketing people at Apple see an opportunity to profit as crypto investors lose their shirts.
Where can I purchase an App Store. Not sold separately.
Why would I want one, if I am not in control of it. I just want to run a program on a computer I bought.
Maybe one can argue a consumer will buy a computer in order to get the "App Store product", although it seems to me more like a product feature than a product itself. Personally, I would intentionally choose a computer without an App Store, where I can install whatever I want, and without reporting all the software I use to Apple.
After all, I know what software I want to install. As a NetBSD user I prefer to compile programs myself. The only "curation" I want is small source code size so I can read through the program before deciding whether to compile and test. Thus I have to do the "curation" myself. It cannot be delegated or outsourced. I do not need Apple to recommend software to me. Especially software they did not write. But who cares about me, if I am in a minority, because to the "tech" company proponents, only the majority matters. To the "tech" worker what is not popular is irrelevant. No surprise given the "tech" racket depends on selling adevertising services.
"Discovery" of unpopular software in an App Store is exceedingly difficult. The search capabilities are crude. The design appears to be display "Top 10" type lists and funnel computer owners toward popular programs, creating a lottery for whomever makes the "Top 10" and larger audiences for advertising.
So, you think you don't need curation but actually you do. There is some malware filtering that goes on, and some minimum (and I do mean minimum) quality control. There are content restrictions and such, that make the platform widely appealing. You might not want them, but the reason more and more and more apps are written for the platform is because of market power that comes from being content friendly. So the app you think doesn't need gatekeeping might not have ever even been written had it not been for this gatekeeping.
Kind of like saying, what has a cop ever done for me?
That said, yes, everything about it could be better. I very much detest app discovery in the app store, and it's almost as difficult via web or other means. At least in amazon you can filter out under 4-star products. And if you apply at least one category filter then you can also filter out marketplace sellers. The app store should have at a minimum some kind of stars filter.
There's no transparency or real studies if there's some effective malware filtering by forcing the app store model so at this point it's difficult to take it seriously.
> You might not want them, but the reason more and more and more apps are written for the platform is because of market power that comes from being content friendly
[Citations needed] again basically, there's only two platforms on mobile, it's not like developers can get the luxury to chose a platform.
> There's no transparency or real studies if there's some effective malware filtering by forcing the app store model so at this point it's difficult to take it seriously.
Maybe look at the Android situation: Malware is at least two orders of magnitude more prevalent, and it's mostly because you can type "free fortnite vbucks android" into the search bar, get on a YT video that links to a shady site, that shady site tells the user how to enable sideloading and install spyware apps masquerading as coin generators.
At this point iPhone isn't a product. It's control, manipulation, and extortion of the free market well beyond any notion of fair competition.
Apple won 51+% of American consumers. Now it taxes all of the computing and commerce workloads they engage in.
Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade. They've buttoned up every single industry and put them all under thumb.
Apple is taxing the internet, basically. (And Google's scary and hidden side loading isn't much better.)
The iPhone isn't a product. The Apple ecosystem is. I purchased it to ensure (A) nobody can take my phone, punch in my passcode and Apple ID and install malware that hides itself or otherwise flash the software to look like iOS but with malware on top, and (B) when I use native apps, the chance of having malware distributed to me there is almost 0.
Apple IS a product and the world isn't America. There is not a monopoly of Apple products all over the world. The people and specially in America can vote with their money and buy an Android if you disagree with Apple. Apple is not taxing the Internet when you have other options.
What? This is a weird statement. iPhone is 100% a product. There are many alternatives.
> Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade.
This is not the current scenario. Using your example, it would be like if Tesla owned a building, a coffee shipping company, and coffee making equipment and Starbucks sold coffee using Tesla resources. In this example, it would be expected for Tesla to charge Starbucks a premium for this full service coffee company being white labeled by Starbucks.
>Apple is taxing the internet, basically.
No. Apple is charging a fee to list products for sale on their store. Similar to every other store in existence.
Taxation without representation. Those paying the tax have generally no control over how Apple spends the corresponding revenue.
With respect to those in the US who pay the "30% tax", most of Apple's income is kept offshore so Apple pays minimal if any taxes on it. Compared this to the majority of people in the US who buy Apple computers who keep their income in the US and do pay significant US taxes on it.
> Those paying the tax have generally no control over how Apple spends the corresponding revenue.
Sure you do. The consumer has a voice. If AirPods Pro 2 sucked, you vote by not purchasing them, and if enough other people do the same they'll can Airpods Pro 2 and create a third version in hopes it's good enough to "win back" your vote/money. This is the basis of free market capitalism and allows Apple to make a "product" (the Apple ecosystem) that people don't have to buy into, but they do because of the R&D Apple has invested into their product for over a decade.
If Apple is collecting a "30% tax" and, without any input from the "taxpayer", they choose to spend the tax revenue on producing rechargeable Bluetooth earbuds, how was the taxpayer given a vote on the decision to spend the tax revenue on producing rechargeable Bluetooth earbuds (versus something else). By the time they go to market with the overpriced earbuds, the money has already been spent.
More "planned obsolescence" electronics waste in the landfills.
Going back to the original comment to which I responded, where the commenter compared Apple's "30% tax" to government-levied taxes for public services, this is like giving residents a vote on a new public services project after only it has been completed. At that point, the money has been spent. It's too late to for voters stop the government from spending their money on the project.
Apple has already gone through this of course, and I wonder if it’s going to happen again. And I wonder if a company can survive it. It certainly almost killed Apple the first time, and required Jobs’ return to steer it away from the cliff (I suspect that only someone charismatic like Jobs, in a strongly loyal-customer-base company like Apple could pull it off)
I think we’re probably still a good 5 years away from something like that.
Apple doesn't have any monopolistic positions. None. At all. And they also manifestly have not "driven out" their product people. They're still making genius products.
Submitting this without comment is the smartest thing to do - because if one truly implies what I think parent intends, they’re about as bone headed as they come.
The product is making insanely powerful api’s so that you go from thought to code and from code to customer base at the speed of ideas while still maintaining amazing performance for the end user.
That is still happening - whether or not we agree on SwiftUI - it’s obvious they still care. These ideas BUNDLED with the AppStore is the product for developers and end users. Either enjoy it - or enjoy life on the web, the cross browser compatibilities, the crazy header vulnerabilities, the css not shaping right, the js everywhere… you name it. Just try other fields for a real commercial app - then you’ll see the iOS native app is valuable for a reason.
People can agree to disagree on the value of the walled garden. The problem is that "Just try other fields for a real commercial app" isn't really an option; not for a commercial app that wants to make money. Clearly this is not because the App Store offers a better developer ecosystem than other platforms. It just enjoys entrenched market share.
Most users do not know they are facilitating Apple's extortion racket, nor have they thought about what that implies for them. They just see a shiny iphone and think "oooh I want that"
It's because they have some great marketing. But people aren't choosing the app store. They choose a phone, and then they are forced to use the app store if they want to add any apps.
It is absolutely ridiculous that Apple and Google demand 30% cut of all transactions happening in the apps that run on their OS. Imagine if Windows had done that or if Netscape/Firefox/Opera had demanded 30% cut of transactions happening on their browsers.
Back in the days when App Stores hadn't launched Android and iOS did not exist, apps for platforms like Palm, Pocket PC, Symbian, Blackberry etc worked like how Windows software still works today - you bought them directly from the developer's website. Stores like Handdango and Pocketgear were multi platform app stores who were taking 30% cut. I remember even back then there were voices being raised against those fees. But back then, those were not the only ways one could distribute their apps. None of the smartphone platforms back then mandated developers to distribute their apps only through their store. Even when Android launched, it was open and these stores carried Android apps as well. Apple launched the app store and changed everything in the name of security and user experience. It was just a shameless money grab by a giant corporation.
Microsoft got all the flack just for bundling a browser for free with OS while Google and Apple have been arm twisting developers into paying 30% of their revenue for years.
It really boils my piss how Apple refuses to acknowledge that their relationship with developers is symbiotic.
Sure, Apple has built up a platform with tens of millions of paying customers, and invests in development of APIs (though they certainly aren’t investing in any fucking documentation or quality control). But anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that without third party apps there would be nothing left to invest in.
Did Windows Phone fail because the devices and system software were inherently worse? Of course not, it failed because Microsoft couldn’t convince developers to support it.
I know it’s in company interests to act this way—to the tune of dozens of billions of dollars—but when you read some of the things Cook, Federighi, and Schiller said during the Epic trial, it gives an impression that they genuinely do believe that all economic activity on an iPhone or iPad is thanks solely to Apple. Absolute lunacy.
It has prevented me from pursuing a couple of business ideas that would not be viable if we didn’t have iPhone coverage.
When I see that their own software quality is lagging years behind the hardware despite effectively unlimited funding; and the App Store is so chaotic that big-name apps can do Porn while startups have to fear the underpaid reviewer’s wrath on every random detail —
Well I don’t feel like that’s a very stable bet to place on your business. And it makes me sad because the devices, especially the MacBooks, are still the best on many measures.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you are mistaken because pornographic content is forbidden on both major app stores so I find it unlikely Apple would allow even a big company to have such an app on their platform
> ...Apple and Google demand 30% cut of all transactions happening in the apps that run on their OS.
While I too think 30% is ridiculous, Google is the only one of the two here that allows for alternative app stores and side loading. Yes, the side loading process could be better, but Apple provides no such option.
Yes, by giving IE away for free while bundling it with Windows, at a time when Netscape was trying to sell their browser - basically the polar opposite of what Google and Apple are doing with their app stores.
Since then, it has become completely expected that any consumer OS includes a bundled web browser for free.
Not that MS is not doing many other shady things to try to control what you do and push their products in today's Windows, mind you. The only point is that, as bad as consumer computing was in the 90s, it's much much worse today in terms of user and developer freedom/choice.
This is true, but what Google do with the play store (install it by default, take 30% of everything, make it hard to install without it) is so much worse.
And Apple's app store where you can't even get around it if you want to is an order of magnitude worse again.
> Even when Android launched, it was open and these stores carried Android apps as well.
Android is still open and you still absolutely can DIY your app distribution. You can completely ignore the existence of Google and their services if you so desire. As a user, you can set up your new phone completely offline, then disable all Google services, and only then give it an internet connection.
You know what baffles me? That Apple doesn't have a separate, "VIP" review process for apps that are from established, known companies.
When I see a independent developer complaining about Apple (or Google) being arbitrary in their app review process, I can at least understand how it's some low-paid employee trying to fulfill a daily quota. It still sucks, but I see the economic rationale of low-paid, low-skilled app reviewers there.
But it really surprises me that when it comes to apps from well-known tech companies like Coinbase, that Apple isn't doing a higher-quality review by people who actually know what they're doing and understand the industry. That there isn't a knowledgeable team inside of Apple making sure that corporate partners are treated like partners rather than niche indie developers.
I'm not saying a two-tier system would be more fair, because obviously it wouldn't be. I'm just saying it surprises me that a company like Apple shoots itself in the foot like this with bad decisions that then lead to bad press. It's such an own-goal. (Because in this case, the 30% cut doesn't even make sense conceptually, it's like trying to tax Amazon 30% on physical goods sold through its app.)
It's shocking that this isn't part of the $99/year developer program. 15-minute quarterly check-ins with an Apple developer seem fully within their means.
It sort of is. You get 2 developer technical support tickets (DTS). These are essentially at the level of having an engineer look at your code and help you figure it out. With these they’ve done things like review my build settings when I was having difficulty with a complex build. I believe App Store consultation is one of the available topics, but if not it would be worth trying anyway. These tickets are clearly worth a lot more than $50 each if used well.
Interesting, I didn't now that. Still though, my recommendation is mostly tongue-in-cheek because even spending 5 hours with an Apple engineer won't fix OP's problem. Nevertheless though, thanks for sharing!
What's OP's problem? Everyone has told them that there are multiple tiers of attention in the review department. Plus you get the support credits for specific issues (i.e. ones that aren't a business problem like the 30% cut.)
If that's what he was referring to, then agreed. There is no red telephone access to appeal broadly strategic decision-making, no matter who is the developer, sadly.
The problem isn't Apple's lack of transparency (at least for me) but the fact that they charge $99/year for features that should be a God-given right. They will always piss people off as long as they charge them for a product that should be included with their computer by-default. Until then, I may as well demand Apple include a few rocks from Mars and astronaut ice-cream every year, at least then I'd be getting my $99's worth.
Being able to develop and build an application I’ll only ever side load for myself should be available on any platform, for free. All the App Store stuff can be a billion dollars for all I care, but it’s a travesty that you need a friggin’ Mac and a hundred bucks to make software for your own damn phone.
You can sideload your own apps through Xcode without a full developer account. They only last for 7 days however, so you'll have to keep sideloading them.
Have you submitted an app to the app store? Have you dealt with their reviewers? The stupidity of these reviewers is maddening. I'm certain I do not want a phone call with them, even though they are extorting $99/year from me.
Everyone has faced this to some degree. You want to get your work or message out there and it gets shut down by the powers that be. The question is how to encourage a level playing field. You could have the government step in, however, that comes with its own issues. I wouldn't want a larger entity who has guns being the decision maker.
Apple has been the vanguard of selling software for years. People don't buy desktop software anymore, and it wasn't all that successful to begin with. They do buy software on phones, though, and Apple enables an ecosystem that might not otherwise exist. It's not clear to me that Google needs paid apps. They were happy with ads before that.
Ask yourself this - if we didn't need to pay to publish apps to the Store (or even less, if we could just publish apps that could be side-loaded), how many of us would voluntarily pay $99 per year for Apple's developer support? You could probably count them on one hand.
If the $99 also gets you Apple's 'verified' stamp of approval that guarantees the app won't mess up your phone or drain your battery like crazy, the number might go up a bit. But I agree that it would be great if we could publish apps without the app review process, for users who don't care about verification.
My experience working with a very large app is that, yea, they basically do.
Or at the very least, you get yourself in a certain relationship with Apple that it sort of is like this.
When we had a version we needed to get through quickly due to a bad bug, we'd shoot our contact an email, a few leadership members had this contact's phone number if needed. We'd make a call, and within an hour we usually had the version approved. Sometimes it did come with a caveat of "you're going to need to fix this issue before the next update" or whatever if we hadn't quite followed the rules, but they gave us a bit of leeway in emergency situations.
This does not really mean all updates went through this super fast process. We had to wait weeks at times for app approvals. So it's not really VIP reviewing, it's more like VIP treatment if you're big enough and know the right people.
Edit: and yes, we often ran into the situation of the previous version did something that we figured was fine, and approved by one reviewer but then the next update was flagged as no good by the next reviewer despite the last one approving it.
This process seems to be available to regular apps too now. When Apple rejects an update, they ask whether it's a bug fix update you need approved quickly. If yes, you can resolve the identified issues with the next update.
They started mentioning this in the past few weeks when I was updating clients' apps.
it's a little different. In our case we were circumventing requests to make changes to the app to get approval. We were effectively getting a free pass to ship the version with a possible App Store rule breakage, this one time, and getting it approved super fast.
They do. Small developers get apps rejected for now including detailed update notes whereas big companies like FB, Uber, Google routinely put out updated with generic update notes which is against Apple's developer guidelines.
Uber geofenced Apple’s Cupertino headquarters to hide that it was tracking iPhones and yet they weren't banned entirely from the App Store. They got a mere threat from Tim Cook.
> You know what baffles me? That Apple doesn't have a separate, "VIP" review process for apps that are from established, known companies.
I'm not sure this is true. I know years ago they had an expedited track you could get on. Once we got on it, we had very quick reviews, re-reviews, and releases. I would read about people waiting weeks while we almost always had 48h turn around. I don't think expedited exists anymore since turn around is always quick now, but I could easily see them routing big names towards a senior review team.
Echoing the other comments here, why do you think they don't? I worked on <insert_very_large_game_here> and we had dedicated contacts at apple, special agreements for (some) rules and a different SLA to what I now know is standard.
> That Apple doesn't have a separate, "VIP" review process for apps that are from established, known companies.
Something tells me you've never worked on a top 20 app before then. These VIP review processes absolutely do exist, and any company with an app consistently in the top rankings usually has a contact at Apple on the review team.
Coinbase is a very, very small fry with an app which probably less than 0.1% of iPhone users have installed. I'm not at all surprised they wouldn't make the cutoff for special treatment from Apple. Why should they?
I suspect they very much do have those two separate tracks, but make it look as though it's a single track. When Coinbase get their rejection, I very much doubt that it's due to lack of consideration within Apple.
As others have said, they do. Apple also has dedicated representatives to handle communications with the top apps and partners in various App Store categories, like Games, Travel, etc.
The problem is being an established, known company doesn't mean you can be trusted to not behave badly on the platform with regard to security vulnerabilities or user privacy. See Facebook as a prime example.
The bad press doesn't really matter as long as they have such a dominant profit share on all mobile software sales.
> The practice, called fingerprinting, is prohibited by Apple. To prevent the company from discovering the practice, Uber geofenced Apple headquarters in Cupertino, changing its code so that it would be hidden from Apple Employees. Despite their efforts, Apple discovered the activity, which led to the meeting between the two CEOs, in which Cook told Kalanick to end the practice. If Uber didn’t comply, Cook told him, Uber’s app would be removed from the App Store, a move that would be a huge blow to the ride-sharing company. According to the article, “Mr. Kalanick was shaken by Mr. Cook’s scolding, according to a person who saw him after the meeting,” and ended the practice.
I get so ticked off with these other tech companies that on the one hand want me to support them in their fight to get more laisez faire access to Apple devices, and on the other actively engage in what are undoubtedly some of the most consumer hostile privacy invading practices on the planet. They actively compromise security, and then lobby and payoff senators to get better access because they are unable to compromise consumer security enough to make the profits they need.
The entire industry from Apple on down to startups needs to be nuked with a "no use of user information for any commercial purposes at all" law. Coupled with draconian fines that pierce the corporate veil and are assessed per user violation. We need something like GDPR in the US, but more strict. Apple isn't the problem. I'm starting to see that this entire industry is problematic.
You read that story and Cook is the villain? Uber deserved to get slapped down for that behavior. Should have knocked them off the store for a week just to punish them for the attempt.
Uber doesn't pay any cut to apple. The money collected by Uber is for services and clearly falls under:
> 3.1.3(e) Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry.
> The bad press doesn't really matter as long as they have such a dominant profit share on all mobile software sales.
It also doesn’t matter because there’s no alternative.
“Side-loading” can’t come quick enough. I have no issue with the App Store vetting apps arbitrarily, but there needs to be an alternative where developers can provide their apps direct to consumers without this BS.
> “Side-loading” can’t come quick enough. I have no issue with the App Store vetting apps arbitrarily, but there needs to be an alternative where developers can provide their apps direct to consumers without this BS.
I'd have agreed with you up until I heard about that Facebook Onavo thing and now I don't trust even that. Turns out companies whose whole business is emotional manipulation are really good at dark patterning users into doing unwise and unsafe things with their machines.
Most non-small tech companies. I work for a medium-sized non-tech company where the total resource spend on the apps for our customers doesn’t amount to tens of thousands a year.
> You know what baffles me? That Apple doesn't have a separate, "VIP" review process for apps that are from established, known companies.
That sounds elitists and what is wrong with capitalism. It gets distorted by big corporations having their way with their big elbows inhibiting growth and competition. Then you have people supporting the VIP lane are part of the problem.
Corporations should get equal treatment regardless of their size or in fact small business should get _more_ help than big corporations.
If a company is giving me millions of dollars a year which is going to my employee salaries I am answering their call first. The guy paying me $10k a year will have to wait.
What difference do you think a "higher quality review" would make? Apple is enforcing their strict policy that all purchases from within apps (with some documented exceptions) must use Apple's IAP and cough up the 30%.
This has nothing to do with Apple's kafkaesque review process and everything to do with their policies, which have been increasingly strictly enforced for the last couple of years.
I think he means the "people who actually know what they're doing and understand the industry" part. Someone who understands how crypto works would understand that the user is not making a payment to the app developer and therefore Apple has no claim to a cut of the transaction. If this is the way that Apple wants to enforce their policy, they'll have to take a cut of the transaction when I open my banking app and use that app to pay a bill.
Isn't it obvious that making crypto payments easier allows devs to circumvent Apple's cut?
I don't think people would accept any percentage taken of crypto exchanges.
Let's not beat around the bush. This is Apple protecting the way it earns money, not trying to levy fines on crypto to make more money. I'm pretty sure they understand that this decision makes them unpopular with some people. Their bet is that it preserves the model where there is still a functional review system for code that runs on your phone.
Apple doesn’t ask for or take a mandatory cut of in-app money transfer services. They also don’t take a cut of any physical goods sales (e.g. grocery shopping) or physical services (e.g. Uber car rides).
They take a 15% or 30% cut of all in-app experiences (e.g. entertainment, productivity software, content subscriptions). This is levied through the App Store and IAP.
(They take 0.15% of card payments if they are routed through Apple Pay, levied from the regular merchant fee associated with all card payments. However this is not forced on anyone and bank pays anyway, willingly, as the lower rate of fraud means the fee represents good value.)
> Apple doesn’t ask for or take a mandatory cut of in-app money transfer services.
I suppose you mean like when I use Venmo or my bank. Okay, but I can't readily use those to buy other in-app things like subscriptions, right? So it's consistent.
I’m not sure what the point you’re trying to make is.
If you want to try to use Venmo to pay for in-app content, nobody is stopping you. But if the developer accepts the payment and provides the in-app content to you, they have breached their contract with Apple.
Points/karma acquired in-game that can be exchanged off-app for crypto. Since crypto is so easy to exchange with no verification of buyer/seller needed, you can keep moving around how that works to make Apple's task of reviewing your apps more and more complex until you find a way to do it that they overlooked.
Apple’s 30% tax on IAPs is ultimately a convenience fee on impulse buys. Whereas inherent in the process of sneaking Apple-taxable-purchasable under their nose necessarily requires a very inconvenient process: buying crypto from a retail exchange, then moving it off-exchange to a tumbler, then back again to to buy something from the same (or another) retail exchange is far from convenient - and definitely not instant - so it is not in any appreciable way to circumvent Apple’s IAP tax, because it simply comes down to the fact you can’t make impulse-buys through that system - never mind the txn/gas fees in cryptocurrencies make it very wasteful for microtransactions, or really any transaction below tens-of-dollars.
I’d agree with you provided Bitcoin’s Lightning network worked the way we hoped it would back in the early-2010s, but it doesn’t. Otherwise, your argument reads like is saying Apple should tax every PayPal transaction made through PayPal’s iOS app.
This reminds me of the last time Coinbase had its app removed from the app store in 2013. Our secure messaging app, Gliph, had the ability to send bitcoin and was still live in the App Store.
Our companies shared an investor, and our app was the first to implement Coinbase's API. Between that and SF Bitcoin meetups, I interacted with Brian regularly enough and the App Store was a common topic because in that first year of funding for crypto, the goal was generally find a way to breaking Bitcoin mainstream. (It seemed like it might happen soon, but was in fact still quite early.)
After some press, Apple took our app down. I blogged about it [0], (I believe the first survey of App Store policy toward bitcoin) and that got picked up by Tech Crunch. [1]
I remember speaking with Brian about it on the phone. Apple's objection was on legality of sending Bitcoin in the regions our app was available, so I suggested we could file a legal brief as part of our appeal.
Brian's response was they had already tried that and that Apple was unswayed by their brief. There wasn't much we could really do other than commiserate on being under the thumb of the App Store.
Those were some heady, yet comparatively innocent days in crypto compared to now.
> Apple's objection was on legality of sending Bitcoin in the regions our app was available, so I suggested we could file a legal brief as part of our appeal.
> Brian's response was they had already tried that and that Apple was unswayed by their brief.
A legal brief would go to a judge. This sounds like an appeal written by a lawyer, submitted on behalf of one company to another. Not the same thing.
Or maybe there was a legal case and they filed a brief. Then it would be a judge who decides whether the brief is convincing, not Apple.
It sounds like he might be talking about this time period. If so, he may be mixing up or mixing together multiple events in retelling what happened. The description of the blog post sounds right, the post went bananas. But I don't remember this rifle video thing, a fast walk back (it took months) though, and we definitely were not the biggest wallet provider.
Imagine a bunch of game developers join forces to create something called the Game Asset Service. When you unlock a feature in a game by one of these developers, it gets delivered through the GAS.
The GAS is legally a separate entity from the game companies (although controlled by them), and it sets a varying fee for its delivery network. Maybe the fee is quite high, and unlocking a $6 game feature actually consists of $5.50 fees paid to the GAS and $0.50 paid to the game developer.
Would Apple say: “Sure, this delivery fee you’re paying to GAS is something completely separate from the in-app purchase. We’ll just take our cut only from the $0.50 and let you pass all of the $5.50 through to this GAS corporation that you partially own.”
Of course not, because that structure would be such a transparent attempt by the game developers to evade Apple’s fee.
The situation in crypto isn’t all that different. These gas fees are ultimately paid to Ethereum stakeholders, and Coinbase happens to be a big one.
This is true and matters, but there is a key difference that affects our sense of justice and morality.
Coinbase didn't create Ethereum, and the vast majority of Ethereum stakeholders are not apps on the app store. The fact that ETH gas is mostly unrelated to Coinbase and the app store should also matter in determining how we feel about this.
Even if Coinbase created ethereum and gas went directly to their wallet, would that be any different than Chase collecting a fee when I send a wire using their mobile app? Does Apple collect 30% of bank fees that are the results of actions taken within the various bank's apps? Does Apple charge Venmo a portion of the bank fees that are a part of the stransaction when users transmit money between each other?
No, reread. Both are true, both matter. It's true that apple would not allow the scheme described. It's true that it's similar to gas on Ethereum. But there are also differences that are important.
I read you. Their analogy only "matters" if it closely aligns with the Coinbase situation. It makes no sense to say the comment "is true and matters" if it doesn't work by the same logic ("important differences"). You could say it's "true" that Apple wouldn't tolerate the proposed scheme, but it doesn't matter if no one actually does that. With the failure of the analogy one of "true" and "matters" will be wrong.
I guess I'm using the word "matters" differently. I'm using "matters" to mean, "we ought to consider this when we think about the justice or morality of the situation". Similar to "relevant" or "useful".
I guess we agree on substance, then, and I just think you used a confusingly mild and conciliatory phrasing for criticizing an obviously, shall we say, silly analogy.
> that structure would be such a transparent attempt by the game developers to evade Apple’s fee.
That’s the core of this of course. It’s not the scheme, or how many intermediary there is, or wether entities are separate or not.
It’s about money flowing on the platform that Apple doesn’t get a cut of. Some cases have been grandfathered in at the start of the App Store (mainly physical goods and traditional banking) because there was no way for them to tax that at that time.
I trust Apple to fight tooth and nails to not let any additional money flow escape their tax, whatever it is.
An even easier analogy as to what Apple is probably trying to prevent is a "wallet" app which allows purchasing NFTs for the immediate and continued use and consumption of digital content such as music and music videos which would creating an alternate content store for distribution.
The purchase page for the content would show the purchase price in crypto coins but list the USD equivalent price just below.
Yeah but the GAS is run by artists and they transact in Tater Tots (TOT). When users unlock the feature in the game the developer charges $2 which covers the cost of the content ($0.50) which is delivered outside of the app to their Windows PC at home running the game and so is not subject to the in app purchase restrictions in the first place, and actually is a TOT anyway, plus overhead in case the developer needs to buy more TOTs (which they already have on hand) and then, because they employ a small army of artists who contribute assets to the GAS, have structured their own product such that many of the Tots that the GAS is expecting for the transaction would be paid right back out to their own artists. Never mind that TOTs are worthless because everyone else eats french fries (FFX). But the artists aren't picky and have to eat so they don't complain. Apple is getting hungry for TOTs but realize they have no artists to eat them because they don't participate in the GAS and their designers eat FFX just like everyone else. So instead Apple seems to want to demand 30% of the fair market value of however many TOTs change hands every time the GAS distributes assets to a user who initiated the request from their phone. How does any of this make sense?
At this point in the "30% is unfair" game, I'm fascinated by the general reaction by the crowd. In every high profile case, it comes down to which company you have more affinity for. I watched a lot of the gaming community side with Apple against Epic, because from their perspective it was Epic being greedy and not the other way around.
This time, I'm sure anyone still excited about web3 will side against Apple. It's going to take a coalition of companies with enough goodwill amongst enough people to break the general conception that Apple is, overall, working more in the interests of the consumer than other businesses.
Honestly, I hate web3 but this move is absolutely bullshit on Apple's part. I think it goes a step further than just "30% of IAP money" since there's no download or product that the user is really buying. It would be like Apple demanding fees for Cash App or some other related service.
If it is, it may not be soon. I have never been a fan of these app stores. I like a gatekeeper making sure malicious content doesn't get on our devices, but there should be the option to easily use other stores without jailbreaking the device.
Ironically, this wouldn't be an issue if your hated web3 was the defacto app store. Maybe Apple sees crypto as a game, and buying/selling/trading crypto on the Coinbase app is in-game purchases to Apple.
I'm convinced at this point that Coinbase intended for people to be confused about this: Apple is claiming a 30% cut of the transaction fees that Coinbase charges their customers. If Cash App charged a fee to transfer money, Apple would claim their cut of that fee.
The reason this is different is because the fee does not go to Coinbase at all. It goes to the Ethereum network. If cash app could prove they got zero profit from a service fee that could be one thing. In this case, Coinbase can prove exactly how much the gas fee was and that they do not take a cut of this "fee"
Yes, I think I was mistaken. My thinking was based on a previous title, which didn't specify Coinbase "Wallet" and included the phrase "exchange fees". If they were the fees from Coinbase's trading application, they wouldn't be strictly the gas fees as charged by the Ethereum network. Tweets in the thread also specify gas fees and this is exclusive to NFTs, so I suspect the fees in question are indeed the network gas fees.
> If Cash App charged a fee to transfer money, Apple would claim their cut of that fee.
They do, at least for rapid transfers to banks. It was perhaps not the greatest analogy on my part since transfers within the app are free, but I fully understand what Apple is claiming here. You don't see them claiming Cash App's transfer fees, or bank fees, or other similar charges.
I should apologize since I misunderstood the fees being collected; they are the gas fees as presented in the Wallet app (I'd been thinking the separate app they release that includes the exchange trading, which has transaction fees). It's likely that the gas fees as presented by the Ethereum network are simply being passed along to the app user, which is definitely not the same as I'm suggesting.
If Cash App charges their own fee (ie, it's not a bank fee that Cash App is passing along to the consumer) then I would actually expect Apple to want to claim their cut of that fee. At least, that would be consistent with how they've gone after this in, e.g., the Epic case. (Different type of in-app "purchase", but consistent considering who would be receiving the profit of the fee is the app developer.)
I believe in the title I originally saw, it specified "exchange fees".
But also from the tweet thread (second tweet):
> Apple’s claim is that the gas fees required to send NFTs need to be paid through their In-App Purchase system, so that they can collect 30% of the gas fee.
I'm not actually sure about this because it's their Wallet app rather than the trading app. If they obfuscate the gas fee behind their own transaction fee the way they do with their trading app, I believe my take is correct.
Otherwise, it actually seems way more open for debate. It's possible I am mistaken and this is a reach from Apple. It might also be that Apple is claiming that Coinbase needs to obfuscate the fee in such a manner, which sounds kinda crazy to me.
At any rate, this confusion about it being the assets themselves being cut is what I intended to be speaking about, so apologies if this response is not helpful.
Agreed, but I'm not sure we're anywhere near the tipping point. Apple users really love Apple and will (nearly) always interpret Apple's actions with the absolute best of intentions/benefit of the doubt. The company is not stupid. Like most of silicon valley they will always come up with some justification for doing what they want to do, and odds are good that they'll actually convince themselves that those are the real reasons.
Having been someone who also sided with Apple against Epic but has changed his tune, I think a big point there was that it was the first notable company that spoke up about Apple's practices.
While I tend to think most of this web3 stuff is trash (especially the centralized stuff), I think by now so many cases of Apple's excessive control have piled up that changing opinions is understandable. Especially as someone who hasn't had to deal directly with Apple's restrictive ecosystem before.
People are against Epic because the CEO is obviously acting in bad faith and so shameless about it. He claims to be in favor of open platforms when it is beneficial to his bottom line, but refuses to do the bare minimum to support Linux. Obviously tech nerds aren't going to like that.
I’m not sure it’s worse than what every CEO of dominant international companies say and do (Tim Cook included…he had to do a lot of declarations for the Epic trial, and boy were they bullshit).
I suppose it’s the sheer lack of linux support that pisses them, which is an impacting situation that goes beyond how they feel about the CEO ?
While Epic is definitely a shady company, an open platform is still free to choose what operating systems it supports. Epic doesn't support Linux, Flatpak doesn't support Windows, and neither are technical problems that can't be fixed.
Obviously Epic will never be as open as Flatpak, but just because they don't want to deal with Linux doesn't mean they should be barred from any other platform they do want to support.
The Android situation is a bit different they can absolutely support that. They choose not to and went after Google's fees instead, which is a bit harder to defend (but still shouldn't need to be defended, Google should still allow app developers to opt out of their payment processing, perhaps in exchange for footing the bill for storage and network traffic).
With EU regulations coming into effect next year, I think we're going to see big tech companies squirm even more, right up to the point where they'll lose a huge lawsuit. After that we'll either see Apple leave the EU out of spite or concessions will be made, paving the way for installing iPhone applications of your choice.
If anything this makes me sympathize with consumer rights professionals. How could you work full time to protect and empower people who actively work against themselves and your work and not be severely depressed? No wonder so many end up switching sides.
care to mention some of these companies that have enough goodwill?. Hopefully it is not Twitter and facebook because they lead the attack on app store policy ( beside epic of course)
Apple's evil AppStore monopoly should be dismantled by the lawmakers. Users should own the device, not rent it from Apple. Until the users are in complete control which apps they can run, it is rent, not ownership.
For people happy with the current state of affairs: nobody will be forcing you to install third party stores or sideload apps.
It literally takes commenting out a single if statement to end this. The one that checks whether the certificate the app is signed with was issued by Apple. Imagine this many suffering caused by a single conditional branch instruction!
these days ISPs only have the list of the IPs you have visited. With many things hosted on AWS and hidden behind Cloudflare, this list is almost useless.
CloudFlare probably has a list of most websites you have visited, though. And the contents of all CloudFlare-"protected" pages get proxied through their edge. They are effectively a Global Active Adversary.
I haven't seen them abusing this power except for some incompetence (i.e. injecting JS into pages that customers didn't sign up for) but maybe they're just really good at hiding it.
Wouldn't a better comparison be 30% of the add-on fees that a bank charged you for a bank transfer? And that does seem like something they would expect if it were paid via the app.
It's hard not to see that Apple is playing with fire here, but they've gotten away with so much and they have so much to lose.
The "right" way to fix this is:
1. Apple allows users to download/install software that is not on the app store. If a user owns the device they should be able to do what they want with it, even if it's "risky" or whatever. But this means those users that feel the most comfortable continuing to only use apple-approved apps in the app store can continue to do so.
2. Software downloaded from the app store, using apple servers and services, must give Apple the cut (30%) they ask for. If the app doesn't use apple's infrastructure or payment system, apple shouldn't have any right to a cut of the payment.
Apple has billions of dollars of revenue at stake here, so of course they're going to fight it as long as they can.
What in the world could possibly be enough to where enabling sideloading is ONLY possible by the owner of the device, and not just someone who looked over your shoulder for an hour and saw you type in your passcode+Apple ID, and has now swiped your phone to install spyware that utilizes a 0-day to hide itself from you?
Thanks for sharing, but I absolutely do not want to live in a world where one single company determines what I can and cannot install on my own devices. That type of fear-mongering leading to more restrictions is a disaster.
I own a mac and love it, but if Apple ever attempts to lock it down the way they have the iPhone/iPad, myself and many others will leave that ecosystem forever.
i don't really worry about it myself much. i just err on the side of not installing things i'm unsure about
but my boomer mother? whewwwwwwwwww if someone told her she had to install a 3rd party app store to see pictures of her friend's birthday cake or some terrible grape salad recipe, she'd do it. and she'd give them all of her personal info too.
The exchange is NFT for eth. In order to do that, it requires gas. That is a fee imposed on the user, meaning they have to pay something in order to pursue a digital transaction for digital goods. Payments in iOS for digital goods and services must go through the App Store. It's right there in the developer terms, and has largely not changed since the App Store was introduced.
Doesn't matter that it's gas. It's a purchase the user is trying to make. The rules apply.
Coinbase may think it's unfair, but that's what they agreed to when they put the app in the App Store. Apple can continue to enforce this rule as long as they're legally allowed to, which doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon.
No sympathy for Coinbase here. They chose to whine in public when they could just sue Apple like a grown up.
If apologists like you ran the world, I would probably have to pay Apple 30% premium on the value of my entire house if I tried to sign mortgage paperwork on an iphone
Oh, you can do better than that. You'd pay 30% on the mortgage, the seller would pay 30% on the mortgage, the title company would pay 30% on the mortgage, the listing agent would pay 30% on the listing.... my point here not merely being sarcasm, though it is that as well, but it isn't scalable to have every little person involved in facilitating some transaction trying to take 30%.
You mean like how the title company, listing agent, mortgage broker, notary etc. all take money from the simple transaction that should be just between buyer and seller? Same idea.
Generally they are taking money roughly proportional to the value being added. You may grumble, but as lotsofpulp also points out, you're welcome to do it yourself. If you didn't, you were presumably still OK with the money being spent. The existence of a reasonable self-serve option keeps the fees reasonable; they can't charge literally 30% of the mortgage for these fees because then everyone would just do it for themselves. (And some of those people would get good at it, and open new businesses that did it for you for a more reasonable price.)
There is some inherent subjectivity to "roughly proportional to the value being added", but in my opinion, it becomes reasonably objective at some point when the value isn't being added. Not 100%, but reasonably so. I think part of the problem with Apple's policy here is that it is another example of trying to jam too large a set of cases into the roof of one policy, a pervasive problem right now with many Silicon Valley-style businesses that try to substitute expensive human insight with cheap computer code for economic decisions. There are perhaps cases where 30% is justified, because Apple is providing that much value to the target transaction. I'll leave that to the reader to decide.
But there are clearly other sorts of transactions that were going to take place anyhow, and it basically just happens to be taking place through an app. Apple did not introduce any significant number of people to Coinbase by putting the Coinbase app on the store. It does not provide a huge amount of service to Coinbase on a per-transaction basis; Coinbase has the financial infrastructure, the technical infrastructure, etc. One way you can tell Apple is not terribly involved is, what are they responsible for in this case? Not very much; even if Apple totally vaporized and all Apple services disappeared, the user could still perform the target transaction on a different platform with virtually no effort. Contrast with the answer to "what if Coinbase totally vaporized and all their services disappeared?" This transaction would become impossible.
For a transaction like this, where Apple did no marketing, where Apple provides essentially no irreplaceable technical service, where the transaction can trivially be done elsewhere and it is just happening to occur on Apple services, where the value flow doesn't need to involve Apple at all, a 30% charge seems outrageously large.
I think some of the problem in debating this, and arguably all the way down to people understanding this, is that both these cases exist simultaneously, and they are both "true". There are apps that exist and thrive only because of Apple infrastructure, services, and promotion. 30% doesn't seem unreasonable, at least in the abstract. But other apps don't have anything like that service or support from Apple, but get hit with the exact same fee. This is the sort of thing that really starts to look like monopolistic rent seeking. (Or at least oligopolistic rent seeking.)
Apple store people just don't know how cryptocurrencies work. The gas fee doesn't go to Coinbase, it's going to completely random people, called miners or stakers. Why Coinbase should pay for the fees it doesn't receive?
They don't need to know because it doesn't matter and they don't care. They see it as you buying a digital item. It doesn't matter to them if it's coins for virtual slots or NFTs—it's all the same. It's up to you to figure it out. Coinbase could, conceivably, charge you through the app store and then process the transaction for you. This would be a nightmare to do and defeat the "purpose" of crypto, but it's possible.
One of the benefits of Apple's enforcement here is their extremely generous refund policy. If you ever buy something by accident (or even on purpose, really, and just later regret it) you can ask Apple for a refund and it's almost guaranteed they grant it.
Obviously crypto users don't really think about refunds because nothing is reversible… although who knows, maybe they do.
Honestly, Apple and Google should ban ALL software crypto wallets. No one is checking to see how secure they are. A seed generated on a software wallet may appear random to the user, but there is NO REASON AT ALL to believe that it is, and no way to verify that it is. IMO every iOS software wallet is compromised simply by virtue of the fact that it's impossible to know whether the seed was generated securely.
I 100% guarantee you there will eventually be a massive "hack" on a major iOS software wallet which is nothing more than the person who wrote the code intentionally making it such that they know how the seed is generated. It would be trivial to generate seeds that appear random but are based on nothing more than a passphrase you know and a timestamp that you can increment over, allowing you at any time to generate all possible private keys for every wallet ever made with your app. That app is probably already out there and people are using it, blissfully unaware that at any time all their crypto could just disappear. If the attacker is smart they can later patch the app, remove their proprietary seed generation and no one will EVER know. They can drain wallets randomly and everyone will assume that the victim must be responsible for the compromised seed, when in reality it was compromised on generation. The attacker will never get caught. I would be honestly surprised if this isn't happening right now.
> Payments in iOS for digital goods and services must go through the App Store. It's right there in the developer terms, and has largely not changed since the App Store was introduced.
They're not asking for the platform fee, they're asking for the underlying banking fee, they're essentially asking for fees from swift transfers coming out of your bank account.
If Apple told the FBI to go pound sand in the San Bernardino shooter case, where the government wanted a back door to the iPhone, what makes you think they’re going to pressures by some crypto geeks?
> what makes you think they’re going to pressures by some crypto geeks?
They wouldn't be the ones being pressured. Instead it would be lawmakers.
The EU has already passed a law, and the USA is considering one, that has already passed out of committee.
Governments can just start confiscating Apple's funds. What, is there going to be an Apple private military, that invades bank of America, and forces them at gone point to not follow a court order? Yeah no. The courts will order them to pay money, and the banks will send the money, no matter what Apple thinks.
The Fines in EU would be something like 10% of global revenue. They can't ignore that.
It's actually kinda funny because it's exactly right. The US has less power than the CCP to control Apple. Perks of being too big to fail. Apple doesn't bend the knee to the CCP -- gtfo. Apple doesn't bend the knee to the US gov't -- five years and a massive political battle later some Apple exec gets dragged to a congressional hearing to get mildly berated by a 70 year old white dude who doesn't even care outside of scoring some political points for the next midterm election and a fine, maybe? Not too big though, it can't actually hurt them because that's jobs and American business.
For those who don’t know: you can fully encrypt your iPhone backups and store them locally on your computer if you prefer. You do not need to use iCloud backup to use an iPhone.
No because investments are not digital goods. Just because something is not physical does not mean it is digital. For example, a right to mine iron is not a physical thing, nor is it a digital thing; instead it is a legal thing.
I think this is a great question. Stocks and NFTs are largely the same in my eyes - but I can't imagine Fidelity even bothering with an iPhone app if they lost 30% of each transaction people make (unless it was solely on the fees - I'm not sure where Apple draws the lines).
Also - does Apple take 30% from each Amazon purchase? I overwhelmingly just use the Amazon app for purchasing - I can't imagine the amount of money Apple makes from Amazon alone, if so.
You're completely right in that this is exactly what the app store rules will describe as a digital transaction.
It also highlights the insanity of the app store rules. I though Facebook being blocked from showing the percentage of purchases being sent to Apple was peak ridiculousness, but this is yet another step.
Apple has more money, power and influence than Coinbase by orders of magnitude. If Coinbase doesn't have a really strong case (like it would be in this case) going to court would be a disaster.
Lawsuits of this sort don't really hinge on "power" or "influence", they hinge on legal arguments and precedent.
As far as money goes, both companies have enough to be able to see a lawsuit through to completion.
So it doesn't matter much that Apple has "more money, power and influence". Coinbase would either have a case or have no case, irrespective of those factors.
I'm sorry but I don't trust the legal system to be so ideal as you do. From my point of view money first, and power and influence second, can bend anything to the favor of those who have them in our current society.
I believe that US state and federal judges generally use sound legal reasoning when deciding civil suits, and I'm pretty sure that they don't take bribes, but I'm not a lawyer so I can't profess to be close to that whole process.
Sure it's true that if one party can't afford legal representation, the other party will have a better outcome. But that's not the case here.
Try and get an abortion in Texas for yourself or someone you care about and let me know how those precedents and legal arguments work out for you kiddo.
You edited the comment I responded to and removed the "precedent" related part, which is supposed to be an important part of US jurisprudence; discussing edited comments without original context/comment is pointless.
I believe I edited it before we went off on this tangent, but to be honest I can't be sure. Your comment was posted 40 minutes after mine, and I don't usually go back that late to edit my comments. If I did, I didn't do it intentionally.
Precedent is itself no more than an interpretation of law, in other words a line of legal reasoning that's already been ossified. I probably edited out the part about precedent because I felt it was redundant to "legal reasoning".
In any case, I don't see how "precedent" makes or breaks anyone's argument here.
There's a different reason Apple should block the feature: NFTs are a scam. I have zero interest in falling for scams, I want walled gardens to protect me from them. Unfortunately they did not use this reason.
Yes, NFT proponents and those invested in the swindle try to imply such. They try to imply NFTs are worth anything outside their ecosystem. They try to imply this by relying on blockchain technology while in reality its centralized and there is no consensus on the intellectual property because the authority isn't verified. Its as if you run a digital notary which would rely on law to be enforced, but the law would only work within the notary vicinity. If I own the copy of the artwork (say a digital equivalent of a Picasso) because I made it or bought the rights from the owner then I will have that copy even when all NFTs are purged off the earth. And copyright law is recognized nearly worthwide while a NFT blockchain... is not.
I think you overestimate the extent to which the political parties will look at the most profitable company in America and say "hmm, time to disrupt that".
Profitable and generally well-regarded by consumers.
Even if it were blatantly monopolistic, that only matters if its bad for consumers. The vast majority of non-HN crowd is super, super happy being inside of Apple's walled garden.
Split up? They're not a monopoly in the phone market and only barely have a majority market share.
I don't defend Apple's actions but I don't think this is a company-sized anticompetition problem. This is a regulation problem where it should be a user right to have access to alternate app stores, and to choose to run whatever software we want.
We need a progressive tax on corporate revenue: billion dollar companies should be taxed a significantly higher rate than million dollar companies. (we currently have the opposite)
The power disparity between corporations and citizens is huge and growing. It should be expensive to be mega powerful, and trillion dollar companies should be paying huge taxes to incentivize them breaking up into smaller units: a vertically integrated trillion dollar company is enough of a monopoly to hurt the market even if there are other competitors. It's bad for society.
I'm all for this if government would outlaw all the bad behavior I can currently pay Apple to protect me from, first. Which they really ought to do anyway. Like, do that and I'll join you with the pitchforks demanding Apple change its ways or be destroyed. Meanwhile... please don't.
That's an awfully vague demand. Apple protects you from a handful of things and exposes you to others, it's not a binary situation in any sense (nor will "outlawing" everything you disagree with).
Mind you, neither of us need to be at each other's throat. Apple can give me a Developer Mode toggle without taking anything away from you.
One side believes there's a risk of companies leaving the App Store if that monopoly's broken, which would make things worse for them than the current situation.
The other thinks that's bullshit because that hasn't happened on Android.
The first notes that Android hasn't restricted Facebook practices such that Facebook's blaming them for significant earnings misses, so, you know, things might play out a little differently on iOS than it did on Android, and also this group prefer the status quo to even the best-likely outcome from shaking that up, so no amount of risk to it is worth it to them (us).
Except usually instead of writing it out plainly like that, the pro-Apple poster writes something shorter and less well-considered, probably assuming certain parts of that are obvious and don't need to be written out, the other jumps on it, a flamewar ensues, and the next time around we get a sea of comments that are like "I just don't understand how this would hurt Apple-lovers, they can just stay on the App Store" and it all repeats.
Its BS to think Apple is the cop that is going to fight your fights. Apple only cares about money, and they're going to obediently abide by local laws - see China. We need more/stronger laws, we don't need to give Apple more power.
Yes, of course, I agree. Again, I'd rather a bunch of the stuff Apple prohibits were simply illegal (plus a few things they don't) and that several huge companies, including Apple, were broken up into a dozen or more parts. But in the meantime I'm glad to have one platform where some of those practices are effectively illegal, at least. The second government steps up I'll be thrilled to see them smashed to bits (and hopefully not only them—and hey, those others don't have to wait as far as I'm concerned!).
Money = Power. Why would Apple allow this breaking up? Its naive to think otherwise, see what is happening in South Korea with Samsung accounting for like 25% of the economy. They're untouchable in South Korea.
thinking of "freedom" as a singular thing that exists is misleading, there's multiple kinds of freedom, that's why GPL exists vs BSD/MIT, there is an inherent conflict between end-user freedom vs developer freedom and the obvious solution (MIT "do anything you want" license is more free than one with licensing stipulations and limitations, right?) doesn't actually maximize freedom for everybody.
We literally already are in a situation where people have opted into a more closed garden, that's the Apple model right now, and people are arguing that it needs to be forcibly opened up, which effectively destroys the walled-garden model. Like, the reason Facebook and Google are arguing that isn't because it's the right thing to do and they're on your side, they're doing it because app review is successfully and significantly holding back their spyware bullshit and this is the mechanism they want to use to get around it, they've found the most-appealing argument that will get nerds arguing on their side to produce the desired outcome. But ultimately they're not arguing for your freedoms here, just like Sony wasn't arguing that they should have to open up their own app store on ps5. They are arguing for their freedoms, not end-users.
Facebook literally already got caught using their dev credentials to deploy a spyware build to users who opted in to additional surveillance that normally would have been prevented by the walled-garden. If you "open it up", the next step is Facebook withdraws their app from the normal app-store, and now you need to install the Facebook App-Store to use facebook, which will demand full permissions to spy on everything, just like their spyware build already did with the dev credentials. This shit is literally already ready to go, they just need the ability to pull the trigger.
Yes, in a notional sense it will be "optional", in the sense you can choose to just not use google or facebook, but in the real world people need those things if they want to maintain their social networks/etc, so in effect merely allowing sideloading to exist completely neuters any possibility of a walled garden existing at all, especially against the largest players from whom you need the most protection. There are dozens of horoscope apps or whatever, there is only one facebook, so you play by their rules or you don't play, that is what the walled garden is really about preventing. Apple is using their leverage to hold back some of the facebooks of the world from preying on users with permissions bullshit and spying.
If you want to "allow some people to choose a walled garden" that's the apple position here. You can still choose a not-walled-garden option for yourself personally, if you want. People are ideologically opposed to the walled-garden existing at all, they want it eliminated, not as merely a choice. It's sort of like the people who "aren't pro-abortion or anti-abortion, they just think everyone should have all the information and as safe an environment as possible and can make their own choice". Congrats that's the pro-choice position, and if you want the option of being able to choose a walled garden but nobody is actually forced to use it then congrats, that's the apple position here, go buy an android phone. Nobody is arguing you shouldn't be able to buy an android like people are arguing about apple, these sides aren't equivalent at all. It is quite literally an "anti-choice" argument from the android side here, they want that choice to be eliminated and walled gardens to cease to exist entirely.
To go back to the original point, BSD/MIT vs GPL... Apple is the GPL freedom model in this situation. Apple is concerned about maximizing end-user freedom even if it kills developer freedom, and even if some specific kinds of user-freedoms are decreased. Yes, you are giving up the ability to sideload apps for free... and that restriction allows the app-review model to exist, which protects user freedoms in the bigger picture. Android is the BSD model, anything goes, and that means giving freedom to large players whose interests run counter to users' interests and user freedoms as a whole. You have lots of freedom on Android, as long as they're freedoms to use google services or facebook or wechat or other closed proprietary all-in-one platforms. And if you want to run google-less replacement builds... go for it but that's not the experience 99.9% of people get out of android, they are just as locked-in to google services as apple people are on apple, but they also get much less protection via app-review etc.
(and again, reminder that sideloading has NEVER been unavailable on ios... it's just not free. the cost of sideloading apps is $99 a year. If you allow anyone to do sideload with no friction, then you just enable the facebooks of the world to demand that you do it, there has to be a friction there if the walled-garden model is ever going to exist.)
And besides app review... in the big picture... what do you think happens when iOS Safari gets killed off? Google already has a basically 95% monoculture of Chrome and Chromium-derivatives (like Edge). When you look at how manifest-v3 has been handled (contrary to the interests of end-users), do anybody really think Google crushing the last 5% of the market that's holding out is going to result in more end-user freedoms? Safari on IOS is a bulwark that nobody likes using but it holds back an ocean of salty consequences if Google can assume complete control of the Browser-As-An-OS platform. Like yeah Safari iOS is trash but it’s load-bearing trash as far as the broader internet and google monoculture...
Yes, in a notional sense it will be "optional", in the sense you can choose to just not use google or facebook, but in the real world people need those things if they want to maintain their social networks/etc
Also in the real world a lot of people "need" to use iMessage or FaceTime, so they have to use iOS whether or not they want the walled garden. Let Apple open up those protocols, and then we can talk about having a real choice.
Nobody is arguing you shouldn't be able to buy an android
Apple was arguing exactly that for many years.
they want that choice to be eliminated and walled gardens to cease to exist entirely
I'll almost bite that bullet. Walled gardens are terrible for freedom and innovation, as we've seen just recently when Apple crippled AirDrop under orders from the Chinese government. I wouldn't say that they shouldn't exist at all, but it should be something that you very explicitly opt in to rather than the default.
what do you think happens when iOS Safari gets killed off?
Alternatively, allowing competition might force Apple to spend some effort making Safari not suck so that doesn't happen.
Have you ever totaled up how much money you are spending on Apple's protection every month to verify it is actualy worth it? And are you really sure that same tradeoff makes sense for larger transactions? Like, if someone is spending hundreds of dollars on gas fees or consumable access credits every month, does it really make sense that they should be paying Apple $30/mo for "protection"? If someone gets really into some app and wants to plunk down $1000 for it, is there any amount of protection in the world that makes $300 feel right?
Very little. The devices & OS are otherwise better-enough than the competition (in the case of iOS, the sole competitor, which goes a long way to explaining why the market sucks so bad) that I'd still be buying them absent app store regulations, so that doesn't count, and anyway the premium's pretty low if you're comparing them to actually-comparable products and factor in resale value. I think the 30% cut (which isn't always that high, these days, for smaller players) of my purchases amounts to low-tens of dollars per year and almost all of that is from a single subscription. So, less than I spend on any one streaming service.
You do not need to protect people. People should learn to protect themselves. If you are stupid and exploited by malware, next time maybe you'll learn the basics of the device you are using. Otherwise you will be forever a slave an electronic device's slave.
Been using computers since... oh, '91 or '92, Apple stuff only since ~2010. Having at least one platform I can use as an actually-useful-in-real-life tool without constantly having to scrutinize and second-guess and mistrust and un-fuck everything is damn nice. They could absolutely be better—a lot better, yes bad stuff gets into the store, yes some practices like loot box gambling really ought to be on their naughty-list except those make them tons of money, et c.—but I like having an option for that kind of experience—even if it's far from perfect, even if they're not as privacy-respecting as they claim, even if App Store rule enforcement and sandboxing protections are less than 100% effective, et c.—especially with government asleep at the wheel, regulation-wise. I like that Apple's in a position to force other companies not to be shitty, while also having an ecosystem too tempting for those companies to ignore. That's great for me.
I'd rather the worst behavior they protect against were simply illegal. I'd rather Apple had other competitors offering similar things (though, absent regulation, that kinda depends on their leveraging monopoly power, so it's hard to see how robust competition would fit into that dynamic). I'd rather no companies were as big as Apple (or Microsoft, or Google, or Facebook, or...) with hands in as many pies. But given the broader environment I'd rather have Apple the way it is, than broken up or destroyed. Ideally, yes, that's what would happen, but the rest of the situation's far from ideal. Fix some of that first, so losing them doesn't remove an option I like having, and I'm with you, let's break them up.
My understanding was that the new EU rules would force Apple to open up their platform to competing app stores, no? In that view, this would seem to be a last gasp by Apple to capture profit that they soon won't be able to seek.
Apple may be forced to have competing app stores but:
a) They would be allowed to then ban apps that exist on alternate stores.
b) They can still collect their 30% cut which no-one has ever said was not permitted. They already have telemetry about what apps are being installed on their phones and can simply bill the third party App Store. Non-payment would result in the store being banned.
Similar situation happened when Apple was forced to support alternate payment processors in Netherlands. Nobody used it because it ended up being less profitable than simply using Apple.
I would love it if public companies were forced to take a niche and stick with it - because the horizontal integration becomes a major anti-competitive tool. Imagine if iOS was developed independently and available for other phone makers as an Android competitor, the iPhone just being one of them. The App Store could be its own thing, as could Apple Music. AirPods could be its own business. Sure, things might be less integrated and tight-knit, but the market would be far more competitive.
At this point I'm almost willing to say horizontal integration is the source of so many competitive problems and anti-consumer behavior.
Yeah but some things would never have seen the light of day. The M1 chips for example were a huge investment that wouldn’t have been made without the behemoth that is Apple behind it.
There comes a point though when you have to break monopoly's for the market's sake.
For example, remember Standard Oil? They made oil super cheap, researched new oils, basically were great for customers almost like Amazon - but they were monopolistic and were shattered for being so. Similar monopolies in the past like Bell Telephone or, arguably, Amazon now are great from the consumer's perspective but terrible for businesses.
In the past, we were less afraid to say, "you're doing great, but you're still too powerful."
I just don’t see a monopoly though. Apple has simply been successful, and there’s no anti-consumer angle to just making incredibly popular products.
A big part of that popularity comes from the tight vertical integration. That’s why so many Apple users see this kind of talk as an attack on us, you want to make the things we like about these products illegal or commercially infeasible. I just don’t see how that is in our interests as consumers.
If you want to use products that work a different way, fine, but I don’t see how that’s our problem.
And it isn't like quality Android phones are somehow niche, hard to find, or cost more. The competitions is strong and Apple only maintains its lead (in fairly short 1-2 year product cycles) with innovation. If it stopped innovating or charging excessive amounts, they would lose their market share very quickly.
And as importantly, if the company making iPhones and the company making Macs were forced to be different entities, how would the A-series chips have evolved into the M-series? Apple took a decade of hard-earned architectural knowledge and evolution to create the M1.
2-3x more energy efficient + the same performance (if not better) than other (Intel) chips ~2 times more expensive. I don't think there's been another leap like that in the last 20-25 years.
Apple has had over a decade designing and testing these chips to exact specifications and use cases.
Without this you have... well, literally everyone else who haven't done this (because they couldn't or wouldn't). This is what makes it different from "specialty SOC offerings".
Apple is more than willing to milk cash cows with little to no innovation - See iphone/ipad/macos/ios, etc. Its the same with chip foundaries/companies - Intel et al. will just milk their own cash cow with mild incremental releases. Companies with nothing to loose often innovate. (e.g. Apple with M1).
Keeping companies "stay hungry, stay foolish" is probably in our best interest ! :)
>What exactly was the threat for Apple in ~2008 or earlier when they started developing their own CPUs?
They had no differentiator, Apple products were seen as beautifully machined luxury trinkets. IBM, and then Intel had them by the balls because Apple couldn't improve the performance of their products unless Intel innovated on their chips - which they had no reason to.
This is a direct response to a perceived threat:
"We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution" - Tim Cook
"Apple executives worried that the iPod would lose market share once cellphone manufacturers figured out how to put MP3 players on their phones. But not if Apple beat them to it."
> "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution" - Tim Cook
This applies to literally every single company that "just earns the same money doing nothing, or very little".
> Apple executives worried that the iPod would lose market share once cellphone manufacturers figured out how to put MP3 players on their phones.
Again, this applies to every single company in the same space
And yet somehow Apple spent those billions of dollars on R&D and others didn't. And on hardware side they keep doing it while the rest of the industry sort of just watches, doing nothing.
As an example: Samsung is entirely dependent on Google for software and on Qualcomm for chips. Unlike Apple, their entire product lines are literally under continuous existensial threat from multiple sides. Tell me, what exactly have they done to fix that?
Whereas Apple, the richest company in the world, either takes risks introducing completely new categories of products (new for them as a company) and wiping the floor with competition (see Apple Watch, 40% market share with Samsung a distant 10%), or managing seamless CPU transition for a two-decade old OS while again wiping the floor with the competition (see the entire M1 saga of the past few years).
Here's how we know they're real threats - They changed their entire business strategy as a response to them. They're own executives are telling us that these are threats. If you still don't believe those were real and tangible long-term threats to their survival then there really isn't anything else I can say.
>And yet somehow Apple spent those billions of dollars on R&D and others didn't. And on hardware side they keep doing it while the rest of the industry sort of just watches, doing nothing.
>As an example: Samsung is entirely dependent on Google for software and on Qualcomm for chips. Unlike Apple, their entire product lines are literally under continuous existensial threat from multiple sides. Tell me, what exactly have they done to fix that?
And where exactly are those SoCs? I mean where are the M1-level chips? Forget M1. Where are A-level chips? They didn't even anticipate the switch to 64-bit on mobile devices, much less M1.
Yes, custom SoCs are nothing new. To pretend that M1 isn't any different from other "specialty SoCs" is delusional.
Even if another company did build it, it would have ended up in a Windows RT situation where no one would want to support it. In this case Apple can use its weight for good and actually get everyone else to support it resulting in a better situation for end users.
Sony is allowed to sell the Playstation but not the controllers. Tesla would be forced to have their car support other operating systems. Leica could sell cameras but not lenses.
For whom? Certainly not for consumers, which are the only people that antitrust regulations are meant to protect. The integrated ecosystem is the point. That's why Apple commands such enormous premium over their competitors.
It helps consumers until it doesn’t. If we follow your logic back to the day, every company would be owned by rail or our economy would look like SK where half the gdp is Samsung.
Isn't antitrust law supposed to protect something you can't see or touch: fair competition. Fair competition should be protected. Lack of competition is bad.
> Although consolidation did advance the large-scale production and distribution of oil products, many critics believed that the resulting concentration of economic power was becoming excessive. In 1906 the U.S. government brought suit against Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890; in 1911 the New Jersey company was ordered to divest itself of its major holdings—33 companies in all.
Yes it became bad for consumers and they were broken up. My point is that if you want a shot at calling in antitrust regulations on Apple (you know, potentially destroying billions of other-peoples’-dollars), you have to prove not that they’re crushing their competition but that 1) they’re doing so unfairly and 2) with negative outcomes for consumers.
> By 1874, his share of the petroleum market jumped to 25 percent, and by 1880 it skyrocketed to about 85 percent. Meanwhile, the price of oil plummeted from 30 cents per gallon in 1869 to eight cents in 1885. Put simply, Rockefeller increased production and lowered prices while creating thousands of well-paid jobs along the way (he usually paid his workers significantly more than his competition did). His business was a model of free-market efficiency.
> But neither his competitors nor the US Supreme Court seemed to take note. In 1911, the court declared Standard Oil a monopoly and ordered its breakup. Revealingly, as scholars have noted, the court made no mention of either predatory pricing or withholding production, as monopoly theory maintains. In fact, economist John S. McGee reviewed over 11,000 pages of trial testimony, including the charges brought by Standard Oil’s competitors. Publishing his findings in the Journal of Law and Economics, he concluded that there was “little to no evidence” of wrongdoing, adding that “Standard Oil did not use predatory price cutting to acquire or keep monopoly power."
I don't understand why the disgruntled companies don't simply band together and remove their apps from Apple until Apple complies? Apple is as reliant on their third party apps for their ecosystems as much as the inverse.
> Apple is as reliant on their third party apps for their ecosystems as much as the inverse.
I would take the other side of this bet. Barrier to entry for software to make a new chat app, social network, streaming app, crypto app, etc is much lower than barrier to entry to make hardware.
Another company willing to play by Apple’s rules will swoop in in relatively little time, while an alternative to iPhone/Apple Watch/AirPods/iPads/M processor computers will not.
Sure, why not? If the top ten games from my Steam library disappeared off the face of the earth I'd still have plenty of other games to play. Games rise and fall all the time; 10 years ago you could have written that about Minecraft and 15 years ago about Runescape. There are certainly still audiences for those games but they are smaller than before.
Say you have a game that you and all your friends play which you've purchased things for and logged thousands of hours on. You wouldn't be upset if it dumped from the App Store simply because Tim Cook woke up and chose violence?
I would certainly be sad. And then I'd start playing something else. It happens all the time in video games. People paid money for Club Penguin memberships and logged untold amounts of time there, too!
Dell does not have ecosystem lock-in the way that Apple does. The question is not whether you will care or be sad that Apple blocked your game, but whether you will care enough or be sad enough to ditch Apple going forward.
Apple killed the 3.5mm headphone jack, it was and remains a really frustrating inconvenience, and yet here I am, still using a bunch of Apple products.
It's not a bad idea but there's no "simply" about it: organizing is hard. And if you're one of the disgruntled companies, you have to balance the chances a campaign like this succeeds against the odds that Apple retaliates against the first companies to sign on.
Doing this would piss off the entire Apple user base of those companies, with no certain gain. Those companies would lose lots of customers as collateral damage in a war that they could potentially lose. Sounds like a bad strategy to me.
- Epic ended up mostly in the same situation against Apple and Google. So you’re basically advocating for leaving the whole mobile market in protest. Few game producers can survive that.
- Apple’s core revenue source is games, and there will always be scummier games pouring money into the platform (think gambling. They’ll never join your union, they can thrive under any condition). That makes boycotts way less effective.
Because the most important apps to users right now are advertising-driven.
And the App Store has been around for nearly a decade now and we already know that users care far more about Apple than they do any one particular app.
People have already invested $1000 into their phones. It will take a long time to get them to switch (probably years tbh) and apple thinks they can wait longer than app developers.
Many of the apps in the Apple App Store—including Coinbase—also offer a web interface which would work fine in Safari. People would not even have to switch phones.
There is a reason these companies make apps, they increase engagement and make it easier to track users. I don't big tech is ready to give up apps on iPhones.
Me either, which is the point: companies complain about the App Store cut, but they are obviously getting value for it because they don’t pull their apps.
This is an interesting question. It reminds me of the contract disputes that content producers sometimes have with cable companies that might result in one or more channels suddenly becoming unavailable for cable customers. Content producers need distribution (or at least did, back in the day) but the cable companies needed them as well and I would imagine must have taken the brunt of customer outrage when a channel became unavailable.
Apple probably has a loaded PR statement ready for a situation like this. Coinbase? The public perception of crypto is already a joke at this point on its own. Facebook? Something about “privacy”. And so on.
I think higher ups at Apple know things we don't know WRT how politicians and agencies will act. It seems they are pretty confident they won't be regulated any time soon, at least in the US.
Guess it's time to write to our politicians and threaten to vote them out. Maybe collect signatures from a bunch of people and attach it to the letter to give it more weight.
It's because Apple is legally allowed to charge a fee for what happens on their platform.
They can do it as a channel cost which is a standard concept in business or they can do it as a fee for using their platform services again another standard concept.
If any government were to prevent this it would unravel the entire economy because supermarkets, retailers and services businesses would no longer be legal. Hence why after nearly a decade the App Store is still fundamentally the same as day one.
So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
-Steve Jobs