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Comment by notthemessiah | Hacker News Reader

> I remember a few years ago Apple bought a fantastic public transit app (Embark?), shut it down and I still don’t think their Maps app comes close to the original transit app.

When Edwin Howard Armstrong invented FM radio, he was working for RCA, which had everything invested in AM radio, an incompatible technology. RCA chose not to invest, and used their political clout to lobby the FCC to cripple FM radio, and their lawyers to drive Armstrong into debt in a protracted legal battle. This drove Armstrong to suicide by defenestration. For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong http://www.free-culture.cc/

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I don't know. How's Dark Sky competing with Apple? I don't think they derive much, if any, revenue from the Weather app. More likely they're paying for the data.

Maybe this is the start of the Epic Games business model.

Buy things and make them exclusive just so no one else can have them.

E^3 model[0], different parameters.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

I mean in Epic's case, its really more like movie/tv/book deals, except with much more favourable terms to the creators.

You forgot to add with more restrictions, decreased customer satisfaction, upsetting early supporters, and an incomplete storefront that barely has enough online features to state it was built in the last 2 decades.

That is in the case of Epic not the OP.

Buying things to bury just to make sure the competition doesn't get them is by no means a new business model or invented by Epic Games. It's been a solid go to for most big companies since forever. It's nothing new for Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.

So I exclusively use Dark Sky on my iPhone and watch. They could also be looking at the data and noticing that most people use Dark Sky as opposed to the default weather app.

I hope that they also realize WHY people are using Dark Sky and keep that.

It might have to do with AccuWeather trying to make weather data harder to access, especially NOAA data. Dark Sky was one of the best API's for weather data too, and now Apple does not have to follow anyone else's rules. Tim Cook's big push for environmental responsibility can also be a reason for the acquisition as well. Having access to this type of data allows them to open the door to more environmental productions/applications.

Apparently DarkSky does use the NOAA data, whereas Apple was pulling data from The Weather Company, now part of IBM.

"IBM purchased the Weather Co. in 2016 and sells weather data to, among others, Apple, for its weather app. The purchase could signal that Apple will develop its own weather model rather than continue to use IBM-derived data, or it may indicate that Apple, too, liked the design of the app." https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/03/31/apple-buys...

per https://twitter.com/ajblum/status/1245045062112813059

> whereas Apple was pulling data from The Weather Company, now part of IBM.

It's turtles all the way down[1]. The Weather Company also leverages NOAA data and is listed as such as a weather service provider on NOAA's site[2]. Although they ostensibly augment it with other sources and apply their own forecasting models to the data, they're still basically repackaging NOAA data in one form or another.

[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

[2] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/success/weather-service-providers

> The Weather Company also leverages NOAA data

... in the USA. But one of its great advantages is the data it receives from tens of thousands of amateur weather reporting stations globally. The Wunderground forecast for our locality is hyper-localised and very accurate for that reason, particularly compared to the national Met Office forecast which applies to an airport 35 miles away, beside a lake and on the other side of mountains.

I had no idea Weather Channel had bought Weather Underground in 2012. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground_(weather...

I remember fondly using their Wunder Radio app in the early iPhone years.

I was an early supporter (and payer) for Wunderground, but now they have turned into another IBM money grab and I refuse to have anything to do with them now.

There is a great episode of 99 percent invisible about this.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-weather-machine/

I realy love the norwegian weather service, yr.no (Has english language selection on top). It works worldwide and has an open API [1]. Not sure where they get the data though but short term it's very good here in Sweden. Long term tends to be a bit exagerated though but improves the closer it gets.

[1] https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/categories/200450271-About-Yr-t...

> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition

This is just nonsense.

Every acquisition they've ever done can directly be seen in future projects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

The products you don't see give a hint into their roadmap.

Is this acquisition going to give more people access to a great weather app or less people access to a great weather app?

It's going to be the same people, working on the same product, but now, it's going to unavailable via their cheif competitor. Tell me how on earth you can consider that not killing competition.

When I first read "killing their competition" I thought it meant killing competition in the form of weather apps. That didn't make any sense to me since Apple makes no money off the Weather app. Only after re-reading that sentence a few times did I realize the OP meant killing Android.

That said, I don't believe that to be the issue either. Death by a thousand cuts, maybe, but I seriously doubt closing off one app from the Android ecosystem is going to do any damage whatsoever. I think this is more about the acquisition of talent and nothing more.

> That didn't make any sense to me since Apple makes no money off the Weather app

But now it won't have to pay for API access anymore, since they'll own the whole backend.

> Is this acquisition going to give more people access to a great weather app or less people access to a great weather app?

Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.

And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

> Perhaps more. It’s a matter of comparing all users of Dark Sky, including via the API and on Android, against the user base of iOS.

Not disagreeing with the following paragraph, but GP specifically asked about "access", and all of these iOS users already had access to Dark Sky; this strictly decreases access, even if more people end up using it.

Is it realy important that a greater number of people may someday use it in the medium term when in the short term there are less actual users and in the long term the potential is again less.

>And perhaps they’ll be able to use the technology in other countries, bringing in more users than Dark Sky ever could.

45% of ios users are well off Americans. Outside of the US 90% of phones are Android who won't be able to use it anymore.

What’s stopping someone from now making a truly great Android weather app? If anything it allows for more competition.

Where can I buy a Primesense-based USB RGBZ camera these days?

Are you suggesting that Apple bought Primesense because they wanted to kill the competition of USB RGBZ cameras?

RGBZ in general. They killed a market just to have a minor feature in their phones. Also keep in mind that Primesense's biggest precious licensee was an Apple competitor.

They’re adding rear facing depth sensor for use with ARKit and are known to have an AR headset in development. I think the new sensor works differently from Primesense (which used a grid projector and a camera instead of LiDAR?) but clearly Apple is doing more with this. I'd be shocked if they didn't have years worth of prototype phones with Primesense systems on the back.

Unfortunately this is still a very narrow vision of what is possible with RGBZ or just Z. You won't want to strap an iPad to a robot, or mount a bunch of iPads on your ceiling, or below your TV connected to your game console.

FaceID uses this technology?

Presumably the rear-facing LiDAR sensor in the new iPads as well, and I suspect those are basically a developer preview for the iPhone 12 Pro hardware so that improved ARKit apps can be ready for the fall

My experience with Shazam is that it has got less good at identifying music since Apple bought it. My guess is that it now ONLY identifies music from the Apple Music catalog.

This suggests that Apple may only buy to augment their product line; whilst still making the core experience worse for everyone overall.

I’ll admit I’ve not done a proper study of post-acquisition Shazam. I’m going on casual observation here.

He had a lifelong neurological condition. He didn't work for RCA. It wasn't just RCA that tried to restrict him. RCA did offer him a million dollars that he refused. He did hit his wife with a poker and she left him.

It's a terrible story and he was treated badly, but you're making it more dramatic than it was.

> "...suicide by defenestration..."

as an aside, my first thought at this phrase was that "he died by removing all the windows?" it took a second to process that properly.

but to the point, that's the kind of anti-competition we need to root out quickly. compete on merits, not on demerits.

i'm sad about the embark app, but i'm hoping that the dark sky integration means no more sending data (however "anonymized") to the shady data broker that is the weather channel.

For those who wonder: it’s not a neologism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague:

The Defenestrations of Prague (Czech: Pražská defenestrace, German: Prager Fenstersturz, Latin: Defenestratio Pragensis) were three incidents in the history of Bohemia in which multiple people were defenestrated (thrown out of a window). The origin of the word "defenestrate" ("out of the window") is believed to come from the episodes in Prague in 1618 when the disgruntled Protestant estates threw two royal governors out of the castle window and wrote an extensive Apologia to this act.

yes, mine was more a temporary confusion between the common notion of the "de-" prefix in english (~"remove") vs. latin (~"out of").

Funnily enough, they're two different Latin word elements. Simplified, there's the "down" de-, as in "destroy," and the "undo" de-, like "defrost." The "undo" de- is also the "not" de- and the "away" de-, related to dis- ("disallow", "discard").

> This drove Armstrong to suicide by defenestration

For those who are extra slow like me: he killed himself by jumping out of a window.

Lol in French defenestration is literally death by jumping out of a window.

In English too

This is a systematic problem with crony capitalism. It will always be with us so long as lobbying and corporate campaign donations are a thing.

Fingers crossed that all the shenanigans preventing cheap ventilators coming to market will force some regulatory action.

By shenanigans, do you perhaps mean the rigorous testing regime applied to a device which will literally be putting the air in your lungs while you're unconscious??

I for one am super happy that people with this attitude have been totally unable to penetrate the medical devices field!

You might want to read about the sort of malfeasance that has put us in this situation:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...

TLDR: A $3000 ventilator was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013” and then Covidien bought out the competition to prevent it coming to fruition.

Covidien at the time already sold a $5000 portable ventilator, which was never rejected by the FDA. The prospective Newport ventilator was rejected for neonatal use, which was a requirement of their BARDA contract.

A badly made ventilator can kill you a lot faster than the virus.

Who needs the weather channel when we have the national weather service publishing forecasts on a 1km x 1km grid?

Is the value of the weather channel that investors expect the national weather service to be abolished?

no, to clarify, apple has been using the weather channel (exclusively, i believe) for weather info across its ecosystem. you can't get integrated weather info on apple devices (iphone, watch, etc.) without it (you can download other apps but they wouldn't integrate with the OS).

i'd be super happy if they switched to the national weather service, but absent that, dark sky is more privacy preserving than the weather channel (who reportedly sell location data, for example).

> Is the value of the weather channel that investors expect the national weather service to be abolished?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/25/weather-i...

"In 2017, Trump nominated Barry Myers, the former CEO of AccuWeather, a company that has advocated for the privatization of large parts of the National Weather Service, to lead NOAA. However, his nomination stalled, in part because of conflict-of-interest concerns since his family still owns the private forecasting company."

Myers doesn’t want to abolish the weather service, he wants to limit who gets the data they collect.

It certainly wouldn’t be profitable for Accuweather to have to do things like gather weather data and have supercomputers to analyze.

The value of these APIs is that they aggregate data worldwide. I don't want to write against the API of every national weather service in the world.

> killing competition

Apple believes it should make/provide the whole “widget”. If they think every phone should ship with a really good weather app, they’ll do one. If one comes on the market that they think is better, they’ll buy it and make it the new default.

I mean they’re not in the weather app business. They aren’t competing against Dark Sky. What they’re competing against is Android, and if their phone comes with a stellar weather app out of the box, that is good for Apple. Others can continue to make weather apps.

iOS comes with a calculator. People still buy PC Calc and Calcbot despite the built-in being pretty useful.

I really wish we could make custom Apple Watch faces, for instance. At least open up the API for it for developers - for example - Apple does not provide an Apple Watch face with both an analog and digital representation, and I can’t make it, beyond an app, which I’d have to constantly reopen...just us me do the things, Apple!

Oddly, the iPad does not come with a calculator.

Unless you count Numbers.

I heard it was because Apple’s C-levels weren’t happy with any of the concepts for a calculator UX that fills the screen of an iPad - and they’re right, even the best iPad calculator there is (PCalc) feels weird to use just to do some quick sums because it fills up my 13-inch iPad Pro’s screen.

I remember some early fan-made concepts for the iPad had it running iPhone apps in floating windows - I think if Apple baked that functionality into the iPad OS from the beginning it would have meant a whole slew of small utility apps like the calculator, clocks and alarms, compass, etc wouldn’t need to be remade - but I’m sure they killed that idea because it wouldn’t motivate developers into making first-class iPad apps - and by “punishing” users with the terrible full-screen iPhone app mode it incentivises developers to put effort into making good native iPad apps - while at the same time making small utility apps an impossibility for iPad OS (though this doesn’t seem to have convinced Instagram...)

To be fair, they could exist now as a Today Screen widget, but then you can’t use it while you have another app open. It’s only with iOS 12+ multitasking support for slide-over and side-bar apps that a calculator app could now work - but it would still need to support full-screen mode - but we’re so close now! And given that, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple did allow iPad apps to run only in sidebar or floating mode - but only if an app really won’t work as a full-screen app - and when/if they do, they’ll definitely launch their own calculator app.

Y’know the Apple Watch didn’t get a first-party calculator until 2019?

How is this anecdote at all analogous? I'm not seeing it.

It's in general putting Apple to like with the company and finishes with the statement:

> For companies like Apple, these acquisitions are more about killing competition than they are about improving their own services or user interfaces

You definitely see this with not just Apple but any big tech company. Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.

> Either they acquire a company for their tech, for their people who work there (talent), for their data or finally, just to be able to kill their company/product.

To make the list more complete I've seen large tech companies acquire another tech company for their users and/or their brand. Think about Microsoft buying Github or Skype.

It certainly doesn't seem like either of those examples further your point. Both GitHub and Skype still exist as essentially the same core product they were at the time of acquisition, plus lots of new features which are clearly the results of substantial investment in the product by Microsoft.

GitHub was a complimentary product that fits into Microsoft’s strategy.

Skype was almost certainly some sort of scheme to kill Skype and bring lawful intercept to the platform. Skype at one point owned consumer voip globally.

For more on the origins of FM and other related tech, see _The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age_, Woolley and Hoye, 2016, https://www.worldcat.org/title/network-the-battle-for-the-ai...

Oh boy.

A lot of stuff known as quintessentially Apple today was bought by them; Siri, Logic, Final Cut, as well as tech like Face ID and soon AR.

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