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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

Apple is a giant corporation with varied interests. In some areas they align with consumers (they’re not heavily in advertising... yet) while in others their anti-competitive behavior is harmful.

Writing these impassioned posts like you’re defending the decisions of your favorite sports team that can do no wrong... oof.

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I don't see any part of the comment that implies that Apple can do no wrong.

but Gruber's post is certainly implying as much.

> That’s exactly what Apple is doing — giving users awareness over what is going on, and control over it.

That doesn't imply that everything Apple does is good, it states that in this case Apple is doing good.

The two are not mutually exclusive, and stating a general practice ("giving ... control over it") without further criticisms or clarifications in a given post is exactly what creates a general implication.

I'm not really here to debate. You can disagree, but considering John's well-discussed pro-Apple bias (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9345312), it seems others agree that his writing often goes out of its way to frame Apple in more of a positive light than Apple likely deserves.

It's fine to praise specific actions, but Gruber's known for praising Apple so much that his Apple critiques tend to make news for how rare they are.

Given that Android supports side loading, what’s the most obvious harm Apple customers are getting with only the App Store? For example, are iOS customers routinely left behind while the Android ecosystem is vibrant? Are iOS customers getting noticeably inferior bang for their buck?

When Apple rejects Epic from its App Store for violating its TOC, is that being 'anti-competitive' ?

The anti-competitiveness is even before that: when Apple decided not to allow sideloading.

Remember when Microsoft was sued for bundling IE with Windows? Now imagine if they blocked other browsers from existing on Windows back then.

And in the US, that lawsuit went nowhere and they never stopped bundling IE.

MS was sued for a number of things including forcing OEMs to pay a license fee for each PC sold whether or not it was shipped with Windows and not allowing third parties to ship alternative browsers.

Yes, not allowing third parties to ship alternative browsers, that was anti-competitive behavior because MS was in the browser business. Now if Apple had a loot box in their game and wouldn't allow Epic to have a loot box in Epic's game, that too would be anti-competitive. But not allowing anyone to have a loot box at all, isn't.

> And in the US, that lawsuit went nowhere and they never stopped bundling IE

Your specificity of “in the US” suggests you know that’s not how it went down in the rest of the world, and that they did infact have to stop bundling IE (and other components) in other countries / regional blocs.

And that also did little good in the EU where they had browser choice...

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/technology/11eubrowser.ht...

What did it look like a year after, two years after, five years after, when compared to the US market?

A single datapoint doesn’t tell the whole story.

Yes Chrome started taking over. Do you think that was because of browser choice or because it was heavily advertised on the home page of the most visited site on the internet and it was included as bundleware on unrelated products?

> they’re not heavily in advertising... yet

haha, remember iAd? That failed quickly.

Didn’t it fail because they used non targeted ads? But those aren’t as effective, so no one used them.

Why aren't they as effective? Contextual ads is what made Google big in the first place, and intuitively it makes sense why they would be the best. It's really weird that personalized ads work well! Makes no sense. Everyone hates how they get ads for stuff they already just bought and so on.

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