Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Go after Apple next. They're the worst of the lot.

Apple is destroying the notion of computing freedom by locking up all their computing devices. You shouldn't be able to sell a computer or phone and prohibit what runs on it. These aren't game consoles sold at a loss with tons of competition - these are the gateways to digital lives and international business.

And what the hell business do any of these three companies have doing movie/tv production? (Four companies, if you count Amazon.) They wouldn't even allow studios to own theaters, and yet we allow these four monopolies to own payments infrastructure, communication, entertainment, devices.

What the fuck? Are we just going to let them soak up the entire economy?

It's absurd and it has to stop.

Break up all four. Microsoft is doing better than ever post-DOJ, and the intervention led to Apple, Google, and Facebook ascendency. (Microsoft had to pay Apple!) The intervention created wealth and opportunity. It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now!

Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store. Don't let them have a say what you can and can't run on your device, how you install software, or how you make repairs or upgrades. And don't let them limit which browsers you can install, either!

Tell Google they can't do Chrome and AMP anymore, and threaten to pull AdSense into a separate company.

Make Facebook open up its chat protocol and provide rich data export and interoperability tools.

Split Amazon and AWS. Make them stop bundling services and selling their own products. Fine them for fakes.

My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls. Visiting Netflix.com should give me first-class native streaming, casting, and screen sharing.

Technology belongs to us, not the giants.

Edit: Apple enablers downvoting. Y'all need to rethink what's going on and have a serious change of heart. I'm not a heretic calling for more freedom and you're not in a puritanical sect defending a blameless entity. This company has trillions of dollars and they don't need you to defend them. You don't need this company to protect you and everyone else - don't blindly trust them while they erode the world around us.

View on HN

> My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen.

No. This is exactly what they should not be doing, because it requires detailed ongoing precision regulatory work.

The government is not a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. It can easily say that the same company can't make both third party app stores and operating systems, or both video search/recommendations and video hosting. It's a clear enough line, it isn't mired in technical details, you swing the sledgehammer at the fault line between the two markets and break them apart. Then you go home.

> The government is not a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. It can easily say that the same company can't make both third party app stores and operating systems, or both video search/recommendations and video hosting. It's a clear enough line, it isn't mired in technical details, you swing the sledgehammer at the fault line between the two markets and break them apart. Then you go home.

This works.

Let's do it.

It sounds nice, Glass-Steagall for tech. Worked in finance for a long time.

But I think that technology is going to make it easy to work around structural separation. Facebook derives its power from building dossiers on billions of people. They are intelligent motivated people. I don't think that pushing different activities into different orgs is going to do anything to limit that power.

Their surveillance business model is what needs to go. Will society collapse if we shift from behavioral to contextual advertising? I doubt it.

My feelings during every GDPR training.

I think you're right. However, the op said it was their "dream".

It's okay to have a dream be infeasible in real life.

My dream government functions as a scalpel, dynamically reacting to situations faster than any one person can think and creating outcomes better than any capitalist market. However, history has shown this to be infeasible so it will always remain a dream.

You’ll find some of what you wish for in China, where government policies and regulation are liquid and reactive.

The App Store is kind of like the CCP regime.

You kowtow to the app store rules, or you're out. There are no other alternatives.

We need laws and regulations to protect freedoms and liberty and give power back to the people.

I think your analogy is all wrong.

> the same company can't make both third party app stores and operating systems, or both video search/recommendations and video hosting

I like the idea of spinning off the search/recommendation/filtering from hosting (for video) and crawling (for search). We should have more diversity, filtering is not to be trusted to a monopoly.

A bit of _as a game developer_ here:

Game consoles shouldn't be special. If the NES and Genesis hadn't had their locks broken then we wouldn't have been graced with some of the greatest entries in their catalogue. Consumers won because anti-consumer digital locks were broken.

Can you give more context? Were there locks on consoles and now there aren't? I'm not aware of this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)

There were locks then and there continues to be locks, stronger locks, nowadays.

IIRC, Codemasters and others discovered the magic numbers necessary to include in the header of the NES cart in order for it to boot, and went on to release unlicensed games; like Micro Machines. I'm hazy on the NES-specifics.

EA reverse engineered the Genesis development kit and released their games in their own carts in large part because they refused Sega's licensing terms; in retrospect, it's similar to Epic/Apple today. Sega eventually caved.

An old Game Informer article about EA and the Genesis:

https://bluetoad.com/publication/?i=73272&article_id=773681

It's not even particularly that the locks are stronger now from a technical perspective, as that when the NES was current, DMCA 1201 didn't exist. It's a terrible piece of legislation whose primary effect is to be harmful to competition.

> IIRC, Codemasters and others discovered the magic numbers necessary to include in the header of the NES cart in order for it to boot

> I'm hazy on the NES-specifics.

I'll fill you in.

The ROM on NES carts doesn't have a header (the ROM files floating around on the Internet do but those aren't part of the cartridge data) - the NES has no firmware or OS. What it is is that the NES console, along with each cart, has a chip called a CIC that was only available from Nintendo, and only if you were a paid licensee. The CIC in the console resets the console constantly unless it handshakes with the CIC on the cartridge.

There were ways to disable the chip; some things I've read say having something on the cart send a voltage spike would disable it. I think Tengen reverse engineered it and developed a compatible chip, they got sued.

As far as the Sega Genesis, I do know a later revision of the Genesis motherboard had a boot ROM and also required the cart to write ASCII 'SEGA' to some I/O ports, otherwise the video chip would not work. The idea was that copying this without authorization was a trademark infringement, but I think a later lawsuit made that tactic legally worthless.

Arcade boards of the 80's and early 90's have some interesting schemes. A number of Capcom games have decryption keys in a RAM that's powered by a 'suicide battery' and if the battery ever dies or is tampered with, the keys are gone and the board stops working.

Rad, thanks!

Video Game history is just amazing at times.

>I think Tengen reverse engineered it and developed a compatible chip, they got sued.

Oh it's a much better story than that! They failed at trying to reverse engineer it so they just straight up stole the source code instead

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIC_(Nintendo)

>Tengen (Atari’s NES games subsidiary) took a different tactic: the corporation obtained a description of the code in the lockout chip from the United States Copyright Office by claiming that it was required to defend against present infringement claims in a legal case.[4] Tengen then used these documents to design their Rabbit chip, which duplicated the function of the 10NES.[4]

If NES didn't have locks it would have went the way of atari (99% of games being utter crap with 0 quality control)

Obviously that's a matter of opinion; and the Atari Flashback consoles sold quite well...

And, of course, not having a licenser did little to harm PC Gaming.

I believe they're referring to loss of publishing control often cited as a reason for the video game crash of 1983 that the NES helped carry the industry out of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983#Loss_...

“My absolute dream would be for the DOJ to make Google and Apple collaborate on a cross-platform native app API and treat it as a first class citizen. Doubly so if web/WASM can make those API calls.”

You want a government mandated software platform?

Regardless of whether any of your criticisms have merit, putting the government in charge of API design seems like a questionable suggestion to say the least.

Also, all these breakups you are suggesting are anti-consumer. Your assumption is that somehow ‘competition’ would produce better products than we currently have, but history doesn’t support that idea.

Without vertical integration you just end up with inefficient consortia attempting to solve problems by committee and political jockeying.

That’s what enabled Apple to overtake WinTel in the first place.

The way to unseat Apple isn’t to use the government to force us back in time.

It’s to recognize the needs they aren’t satisfying and actually contribute to meeting them.

> You want a government mandated software platform?

Sure.

I like that cars all have government mandated turn signals and brake lights too.

Computing is an essential freedom and we can't let these companies turn it into "special sauce" that only they control. The fact that they're this close to doing it is both scary and a shame. We have a chance to get back on the right path, and we should do it.

It's not like an industry and academia consortium wouldn't step in to help build the standard. The W3C got us pretty damn far.

> The way to unseat Apple isn’t to use the government to force us back in time. It’s to recognize the needs they aren’t satisfying and actually contribute to meeting them.

How do you compete with a $2T giant that can easily clone you or lock you out? They've created a "hardware + software + services" megalopoly that does nearly everything. Email, photos, video editing, movies, music, devices, health tracking. When businesses do compete (take SONOS, for instance), Apple comes along and builds their own. Owing to deep integration and ecosystem forces, the competitors aren't able to escape the growth/funding gravity well.

Apple is Thanos, and they're snapping freedom and competition out of existence.

The inability of industry and academia (and the w3c) to create standards is what created the opportunity that enabled Apple to succeed.

If standards had been the solution, Apple wouldn’t have been able to differentiate themselves.

Turn signals are a great example of why this idea is dead on arrival. They have been around for close to a century and the government mandated them 50 years ago.

If you want the US computing industry to move at that speed, the government will make that happen for you.

We just aren’t at the stage in computing where innovation is over and we can afford to force everyone to adhere to a government mandated design.

> The inability of industry and academia (and the w3c) to create standards is what created the opportunity that enabled Apple to succeed.

Steve Jobs crippled the web browser, wouldn't allow non-Safari browsers, and didn't open the hardware APIs the way modern web APIs and WASM seek to do.

Don't misrepresent history. It was always about control.

> Turn signals are a great example of why this idea is dead on arrival. They have been around for close to a century and the government mandated them 50 years ago.

Air bags, tire standards, headlight specifications. You're picking on the wrong part of my argument.

> If you want the US computing industry to move at that speed, the government will make that happen for you.

This sounds like a boogeyman. I hypothesize computing evolution happens slower because of how locked down everything is. Smartphones are stagnant already - no government help required.

Misrepresent history?

How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?

I’m guessing you don’t know that Apple took the open source WebKit from KDE, and continued to develop it into a world class engine in the open.

So open that Google was able to build Chrome with it. It’s still developed completely in the open now and is free to use in your platform, as most of Apple’s competitors actually do.

That is about as far from ‘crippling the web’ as any company in history has ever been.

As for saying that evolution in computing is slower because of how locked down things are, that seems like a view that is hard to understand.

If you can’t see how fast things have moved in software over the past 5 years and then over the past 10, I think you just aren’t looking hard enough.

Smartphone hardware design may have plateaued, but that’s just superficial.

And in any case, a government standard isn’t going to make anything any less locked down.

It will be just as locked down as it is now, more expensive to develop for, and the possibility of an open alternative emerging will be harder than ever, if not impossible.

> How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?

Some examples:

- Automatically erasing all script-writeable storage after 7 days, crippling local PWAs and preventing them from competing with native apps

- dragging their feet on Service Worker support for ages, another PWA issue

- delaying WebGPU standardization

- blocking the standardization of numerous web hardware APIs:

  - Web Bluetooth
  - Web MIDI API
  - Magnetometer API
  - Web NFC API
  - Device Memory API
  - Network Information API
  - Battery Status API
  - Ambient Light Sensor
  - HDCP Policy Check extension for EME
  - Proximity Sensor
  - WebHID
  - Serial API
  - Web USB
  - Geolocation Sensor (background geolocation)
  - User Idle Detection

Why should any of those be web browser APIs? I don't want those anywhere near my browser. They all sound horrible.

Edit: Sorry, I wrote this too fast and didn't finish my thought. To clarity, I meant they sound horrible from a privacy perspective, and I don't think some random website should even have to option to access those APIs. The web has enough tracking and malicious sites as it is.

Imagine if apps as they exist today were actually running on a web platform. Apps indistinguishable to the ones you use today.

They're downloaded over www.

They call device APIs

But they're written in Rust or WASM or something.

Visit Netflix.com and suddenly you have the native Netflix app instantaneously on your device. And it works just the same as the one you use today.

That's what I want to see.

The web isn't just HTML and JavaScript. It's not just documents or web apps. It can be native too.

It's a protected runtime.

And it'll be fast.

I honestly think that is a massive privacy issue. Letting the web browser have any access those API is practically begging for abuse. There are enough privacy and tracking issues already with what they have access to without those being added on. The negative far outweighs any positive you have mentioned.

Should there be better faster options for applications to run? Absolutely. Should they run in the web browser? I don't think so.

How is clicking a link to a web page and tapping "accept" any different than clicking a link that loads an app store entry and tapping install?

Heck use the same permission dialogues.

And the same sandboxing.

Who manages those permissions? The browser? The OS? Is it different dialogs than the OS? If not, you are now giving a browser the ability to delegate those permissions. Is it the same level of granularity?

If I visit one page, say facebook and it gets permission. And then visit another page which embeds Facebook, does it still have all those permissions there? If I visit a page, and it hits 60 different URLs under the hood am I getting 60 accept buttons or blanket accepting all of them?

As I see it, there is a ton of difference in scope there.

The exact same argument exists for apps that embed facebook's SDK in them.

It isn't like we can't treat a WASM compiled program delivered through https the same as any other compiled program delivered through an app store. It is just that launching involves visiting a url instead of tapping an icon.

Sure, but this ignores the fact that App Store apps are reviewed, and Websites are not.

That’s critical to why one is trusted more than the other.

As to the Facebook SDK, yes that’s a problem, but it just proves the point - Apple is in fact continuing to tighten restrictions on what Facebook can do to invade your privacy via their app.

This is only possible because it’s an App and not a website.

I was thinking more about my post after I made it, and I came to the same realization.

Part of this is on iOS, apps are compiled to native code and the restrictions enforced through static analysis before code even reaches the end user.

A good analogy would be Android and how they ban 3rd party advertisements in push notifications. That obviously isn't an API enforcement, indeed that enforcement is only possible with a centralized app store where developer credentials can be revoked.

In comparison, web browsers have become a push notification nightmare, with naive end users being endlessly spammed with garbage on their desktop being delivered through web push notifications.

So, I'll readily concede that a web based open distribution model cannot offer the same API surface area as a distribution model that has a combination of manual reviews and static code analysis being used to enforce customer friendly policies.

That said, a lot of apps still can fit into the web model, including large numbers of games (See: The decades of insanely HQ Flash games that existed until recently, sandboxed(ish) code delivered through a web browser), video playback (in which downloaded apps failed in the 90s, then the field took off thanks to web browsers), music playback (I use Spotify in my browser every day), and many others.

Sure, I don’t think anyone, least of all Apple, is disputing that the web can be a great platform for apps.

The point is that there is a genuine need for both kinds of platform and for people to be able to tell the difference.

Can’t believe people downvoted you for making a clear point

So if you don't like something - it shouldn't exist, and no one else should have it?

That is not what I said. I asked what the justification for them existing is. None of them sounded valuable, and seemed like just additional ways for ads and malicious sites to track you. So what are the up sides? I actually want to understand.

None of them sounded valuable to you - I have no problem imagining how those APIs could be useful (e.g. some simple apps may be replaced by a web application). One can easily apply your argument against access ramps ("My establishment already has stairs, a ramp doesn't sound valuable")

Can you see how they also create privacy problems?

If ramps hypothetically did create privacy problems, would you still wish them out of existence, despite their utility to other people?

Do these exist on Android?

If not, why not?

If they do, why hasn’t it enabled Android to leapfrog iOS?

These are web APIs, not Android/iOS specific, and IIRC Google and possibly other browser vendors have expressed interest in these APIs.

Web standards require voluntary cooperation and isn't something that can be resolved by allowing "better" standards variants to win in a marketplace over others (otherwise they wouldn't really be standards).

Apple has pre-emptively blocked the standardization of these APIs because they effectively have veto power, and they have veto power because web standards aren't really a free market. Browser vendors choose not to ship standards that major browsers don't all agree on, which means that Apple's singular objection scuttles the process by design.

Of course this is one of the risks you have with standards, one bad actor can screw everything up. It's why standards often suck and it's a happy miracle that the web is as good as it is. When Apple themselves can screw up a standard that they directly compete with (web vs native iOS) from the inside, well, that's just too convenient for them.

This isn’t accurate. There are plenty of instances of browser vendors implementing API’s ahead of other vendors.

It simply isn’t true that vendors always wait for agreement. Apple’s participation is important, but not mandatory.

They implement APIs ahead of other vendors because someone has to do it first and try out an implementation, most standards start out as experimental implementations. But when other major browsers reject it as a standard, the API is usually deprecated.

I'm sure there exist instances of vendors not waiting for agreement, those are rare exceptions because it essentially breaks the standard. Web fragmentation was a big problem for a long time and the major browsers have largely willingly agreed to avoid that. Apple's participation is de facto mandatory, they control a major browser and other major browser vendors won't ship something that Apple has openly declared they will never support.

> How exactly did ‘Steve Jobs cripple the web browser’?

> I’m guessing you don’t know that Apple took the open source WebKit from KDE, and continued to develop it into a world class engine in the open.

While I agree with your points that Apple in general contributed a lot when it comes to how humans perceive technology (for better or worse), I cannot let this argument stand untouched.

- WebKit is NOT developed in the open.

- It has a private bug tracker nobody outside Apple can see. Try to report a bug, even as a bug reporter you can't see shit what's happening with it. And this wasn't the case before ~2009, from personal experience.

- Over 80% of contributions were actually from Mozilla or Google.

- WebKit source code is still released 6 months after it was developed, leaving nobody outside Apple's internal team with the capability to even discuss features or APIs.

- Apple's "Open Source" philosophy is the minimum legal requirement, aka dumping a fucking zip file with random shit to a server and forget about it afterwards. Lots of people from Chromium have been in contact with Apple's legal team until they "really complied" and actually dumped the full source code (again, as a shitty zip file). Apple didn't do this on their own, and they never have.

- The Blink incident. Don't forget this. A shitload of contributors left WebKit because of the previous points, and now Chromium is getting dominant due to Blink. Do you think this is a coincidence?

All these policies how Apple "loves Open Source" speak against the fact. Also, don't forget bash, tcsh, zsh and pretty much all related to the brew ecosystem. These people, while they still love Apple's ecosystem, never benefited a single dollar and neither a single contribution from Apple.

If you don't believe me, pick a random zip file on Apple's "open source server" [1], contact the maintainer of said project and ask them about how they think Apple helps them. The answer is: not at all.

I won't dig into the other facts which made the Web crippled, where we've been before with IE6 and ActiveX. Humanity hasn't learned shit from that lesson. And /u/themacguffinman did that already in his own comment to elaborate this fact [2]

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25285306

This depends on your definition of “Developed in the open”.

Nobody is disputing that other people contributed to WebKit, however what is true is that WebKit was brought to the level of maturity require to create a competitive desktop browser before those contributions.

The fact that competitors are able to use WebKit, and that Blink exists is validation that WebKit is really open.

I do agree that Apple controls development of the mainline engine though, but that changes nothing about the meaning.

You're missing the point that standardization usually creates subpar products, which allowed Apple to break standards and create a more valuable product. Standards are inherently stifling in so many ways, you risk a lot with heavy-handed forced standardization. Air bags, tire standards, and headlights are small parts of a car with limited standardization, it's not comparable to inviting the government to involve themselves in application & hardware platform creation that they have no expertise or stake in developing.

Apple's behavior is definitely a problem, but government mandated standards are almost certainly not the answer.

This is the argument against the public option. The existence of a higher industry baseline does not the negate the existence of those who would surpass that standard. It merely means that consumer protections do not begin at zero. If we aspire for a society where everyone is entitled to a basic level of healthcare, or a basic level of income, why not also a basic level of software quality and security?

Because in most cases it's impossible to define what a basic level of software quality and security should be, and it's not likely that people agree on what that level is. Most of the economy is like this, you can't really pre-emptively define what is "good", the best way is to create a market and let consumers decide in aggregate.

Security is a little easier to specify, it's a more clearly defined space but you still have to be careful or you end up with outdated standards actually holding back industry security.

I have nothing against a public option, as long as it is an option. Government regulation of the tech industry doesn't sound to me like it's providing more options.

I never thought basic income was a good idea in the first place, I'm not sure what to say about this.

Basic healthcare is a more complicated case, but the healthcare industry doesn't look anything like the software industry. Regulating healthcare won't and shouldn't be like regulating software.

Apple’s software quality and security is, while far from perfect, at the top of the industry.

Clearly they would meet any such baseline.

Consumer protections of this kind would simply increase the cost of entry, and concentrate more power in the hands of those with capital, I.e. the incumbents and VCs.

Having my Phillips head screwdriver properly fit the Phillips head screw is great. The apple non standard screw is a horrible product for everyone except apple. The whole point is that they can force you to pay for substandard other stuff like their licensed hardware repairs.

They're breaking standards so that they can abuse IP laws to force you to pay more for an equivalent or worse product than the standard

Maybe they do, but evidently consumers accept it and are still willing to pay for it. I don't know whether non-standard screws are a trade-off that Apple needed to make a better product, but it's a trade-off consumers are willing to accept. That indicates that on the whole, Apple's non-standard behavior is still more valuable to consumers overall than their less successful standard competitors even if it is horrible to a minority.

Only a competitor that consumers like as much as Apple but also has standard screws can prove Apple wrong. Or, alternatively, maybe a day will come where consumers care about standard screws/repairability as much as you do. Until then, consumers will continue wanting Apple's non-standard stuff over the rest of the industry's standards, and what consumers want is pretty much the only thing that matters (with few exceptions, of course).

“Apple's non-standard behavior is still more valuable to consumers overall than their less successful standard competitors even if it is horrible to a minority.”

You must realize this doesn’t follow at all right? Almost no one is even aware if their laptop has proprietary screws or not when they’re purchasing one. It’s not listed as a feature on laptop comparison sites or in reviews. People choose Apple for many reasons but it’s not because they prefer non standard screws.

You’re confusing people choosing to buy a product with them endorsing a specific feature of that product that clearly goes against their own interest for no benefit.

Somehow you seem to be claiming that manufacturers and software developers can be forced to produce a better product than Apple by the government.

That seems implausible, but it also seems like they’d have just been outcompeted if that were true.

>> You want a government mandated software platform?

>I like that cars all have government mandated turn signals and brake lights too.

Actually, you have an even better example to use here, which is the government mandated diagnostic computer in cars, which gives a uniform interface, across all brands, for querying what's going wrong with your car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics#OBD-II_si...

OBD-II has remained unchanged for more than 20 years, save for a few vehicle specific codes.

Take a look at WWDC (or any of Google or Amazon’s platform announcements) and see how many new APIs or API chances were announced this year alone.

20 years ago, Macs didn’t even run OSX.

Luckily we don’t have to imagine the industry being fossilized like this: any country that hobbles itself in this way will simply be ignored by the rest of the world as a technology backwater.

The ability to query your car via the uniform OBD-II interface is considered to be a good thing by everyone except those trying to frustrate users, not a "hobbling" of the industry.

And backward-incompatible changes to an API should be considered a downside, not a benefit -- though which may (of course) be justified in the circumstance -- but which should never be trotted out, in and of itself, as evidence of superior engineering or progress, as you seem to be implying here.

Edit: One more thing: Requiring that certain information be provided through a specific interface/standard does not mean they can't also use other standards as an option or support other other features, so I don't know why all the new APIs are a point in your favor either.

Who’s talking about backward incompatible changes? This is about the speed at which new capabilities are added.

What good is a mandatory API if you have to use proprietary extensions a year after it is introduced, because new capabilities have been added to operating systems and hardware?

Do you think gasoline engines have changed as much as computers in the last 20 years? Perhaps people like OBD-II because engines are a mature technology.

I’d be surprised if you can make the case that operating systems and computers can be considered mature.

Edit: Apple enablers downvoting.

You're probably being downvoted because you posted an off-topic rant. The topic is Facebook. Going all, "But what about Apple!" is deflection at best.

The wider topic is antitrust, and that is part of the wider problem of “big tech companies are eating the world.” Its on-topic in a broad sense in my opinion

Yes, while OP did sort of rant I think it adds value to the greater discussion and highlights Facebook's peers

> Apple enablers downvoting.

It's a comically bad idea to talk against Apple around here, but the guidelines are clear: don't talk about downvotes. If you have good points corrective votes will happen.

That being said, while Apple is strongly anti-consumer (in everything except for privacy), Facebook is orders of magnitude worse in more regards than merely celebrating choice. Definitely a great second contender, but the world would be genyinely better place without Facebook.

> If you have good points corrective votes will happen.

I've seen corrective votes happen, but I wouldn't be so categorical in saying all votes are well reasoned and reward cogent argument.

The Law of Pointless Reward systems states -

Any random reward system produces community.

If the community has no shared goal or purpose, the random outcomes the reward system produces will be tolerated.

And just so GP understands—I felt the need to downvote their comment explicitly because of that line at the end.

Honestly I did the same here. It completely undermines their argument and turns their comment into a whine-fest. I don't need to be told how to "think" about things and how I should allow more and more government into my life by some random internet commenter who's upset over downvotes (especially not from one who's not even associated with SV at all and has little to stand on).

Why does living in the valley constitute whether or not you can be opinionated about tech? Maybe I'm ignorant to the fact, but is this a belief that people hold?

I understand. I'm just incredibly angry and tired at the ongoing attacks to our freedom. It's not something I can hold in.

Why litigate in the case of Apple? There is so much competition, Apple is not a monopoly in any market by any stretch of the imagination.

There is a very easy solution to the problem, don't like the computer/phone? Buy a different one!

I totally agree its really stupid to go to such great lengths to lock down devices like they do, but at the same time it really doesn't hurt anyone because anyone who doesn't like it can just buy one of the million (vastly less expensive) alternatives.

Network effects are a real thing. You could switch to the Ubuntu OS if you wanted to, but there’s no developer ecosystem to provide the apps you use daily

Except that modulo very specialized software, those apps exist or they are consumable as web apps from nearly any OS.

That’s a shame, I guess? Ubuntu exists though, so if you want definitive control, you can have it. If you want Brand X commercial software that only runs on Mac, you can have that too. I don’t see why Apple should be required to facilitate both.

Except that there actually is software for the things you do every day on Ubuntu (and Linux in general).

The network effect is the problem here. There's no Linux app that lets me connect to my network of friends and family using the Facetime protocol, which they are all on. Oh I can video chat, for sure, with the nobody else I know who is willing to migrate to a new chat software.

I'm not aware of any non-Apple facetime clients. Are your friends and family all locked in to Apple just because nobody wants to try a different chat app? I know plenty of people who don't have any facetime client whatsoever because they don't have any Apple products whatsoever. I suggest that "nobody else you know" wants to migrate to new chat software because nobody's asking them to.

Nextcloud, Matrix, Discord, Signal, Telegram, Skype, Zoom, hell even Pidgin. These are all competitors to Apple's Facetime -- they all have voice and/or video chat on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS.

Here, let me help you start the conversation that way:

> You: Hey mom/dad/friend/acquaintance/boss, I'm going to use a different program to talk to people who don't have an iPhone. Can you install it and talk to me on it for a bit and test it?

> Mom/dad/friend/acquaintance/boss: Yeah sure what's the app?

> Another mom/dad/friend/acquaintance/boss: What? No.

I wonder which way the conversation will go?

About a quarter of my circle are elderly people who are literally incapable of installing an app themselves. I might have an extreme case, but this world you live in isn't real. Even the young tech savvy ones would immediately be like, "This isn't magically/obviously better, just Facetime me."

An environment where people are forced to install software doesn’t seem like a better world for elderly people who are incapable of installing an app.

Perhaps they should be allowed to buy an appliance where most of their basic computing needs have great, widely used, secure solutions out of the box.

It's called an iPhone.

such as?

So much competition? Which app store do i go to if im not happy with giving apple a 30% cut of my revenue?

I'm honestly surprised how many people come out of the woodwork to defend apple's app store policies.

Probably the one that's full of fake apps and malware. Or you can write desktop apps and sell them however you'd like.

Your argument is disingenious at best.

> Probably the one that's full of fake apps and malware.

If all other marketplaces are shady then why is that? Is it because Apple has locked out any way for a competing marketplace to afford to protect users? If you know of specific instances of fake apps and malware being distributed on other legitimate marketplaces why don't you name such a marketplace and get it improved?

> Or you can write desktop apps and sell them however you'd like.

Desktop apps target a completely different user-base with different wants and needs. That's like asking people wanting to make and sell cars to consider making toys instead.

> Or you can write desktop apps and sell them however you'd like.

How much longer do you think this will be possible?

Or maybe it will still be possible, somehow.

But not without going through some hard to navigate loops and dire threats to life and limb when you proceed with installing software from somebody who couldn't or wouldn't pay up for the necessary certificates.

let's say someone offered you a deal: for a 30% tax, your device would be X% more secure and you'd have Y% fewer troubles with upgrades and dodgy software. Would you take it? I would.

I'm happy to have my house in Apple's gated community because I know every day I'll drive out to Linuxville at the edge of town and work in my shop filled with sharp tools.

Wow. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

That makes no sense. Having more competition does not mean that anything will be less secure.

Like in real life, you could absolutely choose to always go to the one expensive shop you trust rather than a cheap one in a dodgy street.

Wishing for the shop you like to have and use the power to remove the other ones from existence has nothing to do with your own security.

>let's say someone offered you a deal: for a 30% tax, your device would be X% more secure and you'd have Y% fewer troubles with upgrades and dodgy software. Would you take it? I would.

there is no reason you couldn't have this while also having competing app stores. All you would need to do is not install the competing app stores.

People will install the dodgy app store and still blame Apple.

Same way people blamed Microsoft when Bonzi Buddy made their computer barf.

Right now the perception of iPhones is that they work. Soon as people are tricked (and given the $$$ at stake that will happen) into installing malware infested garbage, the platform's rep will take a hit.

Android used to allow apps a lot more freedom, but then android phones turned into ad filled monstrosities with a battery life measured in fractions of a day, and Google had to clamp down.

Also, I wasn't offered a deal. So while you personally think it's a good deal, I'm computer literate enough to not need the help at the expense of my freedom.

The deal is offered when you decide which device you’d like to buy.

I'm not so sure. The FTC for example lists a lot of possibilities, and it states monopoly is used as a convenient shorthand but what actually matters is:

"Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors."

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

As to your point, don't confuse the market of phone devices with the market for apps. If I, as a developer, want to sell my apps what is my choice? The only real choice is Android or iOS.

https://www.businessofapps.com/data/app-revenues/

According to this iOS had two thirds of total sales. I'm probably going to want to develop for that, but oops, I only have one app store choice.

Android phones (the OS) do allow for multiple markets on the phone, as well as side-loading (which is how the markets the phone's manufacturer or reseller don't install can be added).

Most android phones are either in the good area or in the gray zone of the line that shouldn't be crossed. It's difficult to instruct a user on how to add a third party store, and that has much to do with both this almost always being a bad idea as well as customizations on the devices that might make the instructions not the same for all of them.

I also wonder if android applications have need to install as root, or if the system might have a stub that handles this but then isolates the privilege level by classifying applications as individual users / cgroups.

Apple has barely any market power in laptop/desktop. They can do whatever they want there, I don't care, and neither should the DOJ. I also don't think they're meaningfully leveraging their phone market power to increase their computers market power, but maybe I'm missing something ;needing an Apple computer to develop for Apple phones is maybe a concern, but doesn't strike me as rising to the level of anti-trust litigation.

On phones, in the US, they have a dominant position. US Anti-trust doesn't require a absolute monopoly; merely having a dominant position is enough to prohibit anti-competitve behaviors.

Since when do you have a right to computing freedom? Why don’t you buy from Purism instead?

Sorry, but I can’t get behind such a draconian government takeover of private corporations. No one is forcing you to buy an iPhone.

Support free products with your wallet instead of demanding that a the government coerce a private entity to make your arbitrary wishes and desires real.

Consumers should come first before massive corporations. It's why we have regulations in the first place.

A world controlled by a few giant conglomerates that own all of your data while providing the illusion of choice of "just don't buy it" is not a good outcome.

> Consumers should come first before massive corporations

And yet corporations don’t exist to do your particular bidding and make your desires real. Unless a corporation is doing something illegal, you have no right to tell them what to do and what to make.

Apple could, for all intents and purposes, sell useless slabs of aluminum. Your demands to have the government coerce them into creating open APIs would be just as outrageous in this scenario.

Finally, giving the government this much power is shortsighted at best. Has the Trump administration not shown you the extremes the government can go to? The TikTok debacle after Trump’s Tulsa rally was ruined by it, calls to repeal Section 230, etc.

The government is not your friend and it never will be. There will always come a time when it will abuse its powers to the greatest extent possible. Unless corporations are actively and illegally harming consumers, I don’t see why your proposal is necessary.

Consider supporting companies that further your ideals with your own wallet rather than telling other companies what to do.

Support such companies or actually work on projects that further them.

The idea that the government is going to create an open software utopia is hard to understand.

> Unless a corporation is doing something illegal, you have no right to tell them what to do and what to make.

OK so we make it illegal. Governments are good at that.

Make what illegal?

In this case, possibly nothing, since antitrust already exists. But I'm not qualified to decide. It is probably best to wait and see how this and the Apple/Epic case play out to see if changes are required.

I'm just a bit sick of the argument "It's OK if it is legal" when laws exist to serve us and can be changed. Discussion is the first step. My comment was a response to that.

Mandating right to repair and open platforms and formats (such as the circuit diagrams we used to get within our instruction manuals) would be one possibility.

You’d have to make that mandate global, otherwise you’d see countries that do permit trade secrets simply dominate the computing landscape.

This is not a realistic option.

I don't think it needs to be fully global, just a significant market. EU's mandate on USB-C chargers is one example where you lose a lot by opting out.

How is a standardized charging socket in any way comparable to banning trade secrets?

This doesn’t make sense to me.

It's an example of a law in one country changing what a company does in another country to access the market, without a global mandate. I read that as the main point, not trade secrets.

In your example, a company with trade secrets may want to (and be allowed to) keep circuit diagrams or charger designs secret in country A, but have to open them up to be allowed to sell in country B. It becomes a choice that carries a cost without a global mandate.

The war on drugs has entered the chat

> "Unless a corporation is doing something illegal, you have no right to tell them what to do and what to make"

Exactly, legislation and legality is how we tell them what to do.

> Your demands to have the government coerce them into creating open APIs would be just as outrageous in this scenario.

I didn't demand govt-forced open APIs? Where did you come up with that? However right-to-repair and other freedoms and ownership over the hardware you purchase, especially when it's so critical to your life and centrally controlled, is worthwhile to pursue.

> "giving the government this much power is shortsighted at best"

Either the corporation or the government has the power. The challenge is finding the right balance, because neither should have complete authority.

> Exactly, legislation and legality is how well tell them what to do.

What legislation do you propose?

> I didn't demand govt-forced open APIs? Where did you come up with that?

OP’s comment, which you seem to be arguing in favor of. Apologies if I misinterpreted.

> Either the corporation or the government has the power.

Obviously. So long as there are anti-monopolistic practices in place, you can choose the corporation you want to interface with easily. Nothing is stopping OP from buying an Android phone, PinePhone, or Purism Librem 5.

Governments are not something you can choose, not really, and giving them wholesale control of how corporations can create tech products is granting them an absurd level of power, especially when viable alternatives already exist on the free market.

Right-to-repair and freedom to install and operate apps without going through a single centrally-controlled app store.

Here's a question: Should the wireless networks that your phone requires to function follow net neutrality? Why or why not?

Apple is approaching a monopsony over phone profits. Given time it could hollow out the competition until there is no practical alternative.

This line of thinking about viable alternatives goes to extremes when you don’t consider the capabilities of average consumers and differences in quality of product.

Like what the hell am I supposed to do on a purism libre that has 100x less apps of 1/10th the quality as iOS? It currently does not support signal, banking apps, maps, Spotify, slack, Feedly, pocket and millions more. Yes, a dev could potentially spend 100s of hours making shitty homegrown alternatives for every little app - this is a VERY long stretch. And even then 99% of people are not devs and will never ever ever do that. It’s like saying a horse is a viable alternative to a car. It’s not even in the same damn universe yet.

Just because you don’t like the options on the market doesn’t mean they don’t exist. That’s life. You don’t get to force other people into developing something that perfectly fits your desires.

For the record, the Librem 5 does indeed support many of those apps via Anbox.

No ones talking about forcing anyone to develop any thing.

We also need to stop talking about individual purchasing decisions as if they represent the broader market. The point is not that there are zero competitors in a monopolised market. It’s that those competitors suffer at the will of the monopoly and cannot bring viable competing products to market. Hence all the competitors outside of the big two in the mobile space having effectively zero market share combined.

Far from forcing people to develop something anti-trust is design to increase competition by opening up the market. Offering more people the opportunity to build the innovative things they want and consumers the ability to choose. As we saw with the results in this happening to MS it works reasonably well.

I didn’t say anything about forcing people to develop anything.. and yeah that’s life without legislation, but with the right laws it doesn’t have to be.

It's not an illusion, "just don't buy it" would have prevented all of this but clearly the majority of consumers don't agree with you. Whether or not you think it's a good outcome, consumers have largely chosen to buy or use the stuff that these companies make.

Consumers have always come first, and they've already spoken.

Most consumers do not understand the repercussions nor do they understand the power these companies can weld, so you can't say they have spoken.

And I say they do, they don't just don't value it as highly as you do. It's awfully convenient to blindly assert that people can't be trusted to make their own choices, especially when the proposed solution is take away their choice with government regulation.

How is their choice being taken away? They would only be gaining more freedom and control over their devices, not losing anything.

You know, it is possible that many people like Facebook as it is today considering that it's the most popular social network in the world. I'm also really curious what additional freedom and control over their devices consumers would gain from this antitrust suit given that no one is coerced into using Facebook (or Instagram, WhatsApp etc) and Facebook doesn't even make the devices that run those apps.

This thread is about Apple, not Facebook. Right-to-repair and having freedom to install the software you want on the hardware you buy is an important pursuit. Tell me again what choice you're losing with this?

Extremes are never good or useful. We need moderation. Capitalism with guardrails. We already have regulation to ensure certain corporate behaviors don't harm consumers, and even protect them from themselves, which has massively improved quality, safety and reliability of the things we buy.

Sure some regulations are overreaching or outdated, but the rise of giant software/internet companies has upended all of the old considerations of antitrust. There are a few trillion-dollar companies that impact a vast amount of our lives and there's no effective way to disengage from them while living in modern civilization. That's a major problem because pretty soon they will be the "government" that controls your life - but without any of the accountability or transparency.

Evidently it's not important, almost no one pays for it. There are (and were) devices that are very repairable, that aren't so locked down and closed, but few actually care about this when they spend money and it soon goes away when companies realize how little consumers care about it. Saying you wish for X, Y, and Z is worth as much as it costs to say that, which is absolutely nothing. Actually paying money for stuff cuts through the bullshit consumers tell their friends or the internet about what they want or where their priorities are.

My points apply to Apple as well, consumers wanted this and continued buying devices like this. I don't doubt that some people complain about various flaws in the products they buy but it's largely meaningless because they clearly don't care enough about these flaws to put their money where their mouth is. No one forced them to buy hard-to-repair, locked down Apple products when there were more open alternatives, they simply decided that repairability is so unimportant they'd still buy Apple products over a product that is more repairable.

It's one thing if Apple were dishonest or consumers were somehow forced to buy Apple, but they're not. There's nothing actually stopping consumers from buying the phone they want. Consumers aren't being harmed, they're getting what they really want.

This is the choice I lose with this: the ability to buy a product that is locked down and tightly integrated/controlled by Apple. It's a choice millions of consumers have already willingly made. I'm personally living happily without buying Apple's locked down products for myself, I and every other non-Apple consumer didn't need the government to make this choice for me. I don't want the government to remove a choice that millions of consumers have made on their own.

Railroads and the like could have just not sold to the oil men. Or consumers could've just not bought from Standard Oil. ... Until they couldn't.

> Standard Oil

Sounds like the government should and did step in at the "until they couldn't" part, which is not where we're at. Hard to imagine someone unable to stop using Facebook or Instagram or whatever, there's a lot of social media out there.

> Railroads

Considering the US returned control of the railways to their original owners in 1920 and most rail today is privatized, I'm not really sure what you're getting at.

Consumers and competing businesses were still harmed during Standard Oil's rise. Why wait until there are no practical alternatives left?

Other businesses are always harmed during the rise of a dominant business, that's what happens when a dominant business takes marketshare away from you. The question at hand is whether they took their share unfairly. In Standard Oil's case, the government found that they did, which maybe happened too late in Standard Oil's case.

But even though it takes time to determine wrongdoing, we still prosecute crimes after they happen instead of before for obvious reasons. You wait until there is evidence of harm to consumers. Maybe the government has evidence, this is just an early article after all, but again, it's hard to imagine someone unable to stop using Facebook or Instagram or whatever, there's a lot of social media out there.

Where to draw the line is the controversy. Consumer harm isn't always obvious or easily reversible given corporate adversaries with more resources than mid-sized countries.

This is a bad example and a common misconception. Standard Oil was an efficiency monopoly. It was a tremendous boon to consumers:

Instead of buying oil from jobbers, they made the jobbers’ profit by sending their own purchasing men into the oil region. In addition, they made their own sulfuric acid, their own barrels, their own lumber, their own wagons, and their own glue. They kept minute and accurate records of every item from rivets to barrel bungs. They built elaborate storage facilities near their refineries. Rockefeller bargained as shrewdly for crude as anyone before or since. And Sam Andrews coaxed more kerosene from a barrel of crude than could the competition. In addition, the Rockefeller firm put out the cleanest-burning kerosene, and managed to dispose of most of the residues like lubricating oil, paraffin, and vaseline at a profit.

Between 1870 and 1885 the price of refined kerosene dropped from 26 cents to 8 cents per gallon. In the same period, the Standard Oil Company reduced the [refining] costs per gallon from almost 3 cents in 1870 to 0.452 cents in 1885. Clearly, the firm was relatively efficient, and its efficiency was being translated to the consumer in the form of lower prices for a much improved product, and to the firm in the form of additional profits.

https://fee.org/articles/41-rockefellers-standard-oil-compan...

It is difficult to overstate how much Standard Oil revolutionized the oil refinement process, resulting in oil that was significantly cleaner and cheaper than its competitors’.

Customers really liked having lead in their gas, and asbestos in their walls, yet somehow, it was still a bad idea

Government regulators were also fine with having lead in gas for decades, they didn't do much better. In fact government regulators allowing themselves to be swayed by auto-manufacturer paid safety studies probably gave the public a false sense of security.

I often wonder if we would have gotten rid of things like lead and asbestos faster if consumers had to decide for themselves rather than depending upon regulators to determine what is safe.

Consumers can only choose from what options they're given, and if every option is leaded then that's what they'll buy. Also, if they're unaware of the negative effects of lead (or even unaware that their gasoline HAS lead) then there would be no incentive for them to choose what they're told is a worse product. This was before the internet, so it was difficult and time-consuming to do research on something like this. Gas companies said leaded gasoline was safe so everyone went with it.

The government's job here is to do that tedious research and ban/regulate anything that's hazardous to health and safety. The alternative would be a grassroots campaign by citizen experts who decide to go against the advice of what should be trusted sources, which is how you end up with stuff like the anti-vax movement.

If consumers all want unleaded and every available option is leaded, someone will make unleaded fuel and become enormously successful. That's how a market functions.

If they're unaware of the negative effects of lead or a business is being dishonest about what's in the fuel, that definitely falls under unfair/dishonest practices and the government should prosecute that.

But how on earth is that relevant to Facebook or Apple antitrust? Facebook operates a bunch of websites that millions of people voluntarily sign up for and can leave at any time. The government isn't suing Facebook for safety issues or anything, they're suing them for antitrust which means they believe Facebook has somehow unfairly coerced consumers into using their product over their competitors.

Hardly relevant considering Facebook is being sued for antitrust, not for being as unsafe as lead additives or asbestos.

Consumers really didn't like having lead in their gas or asbestos in their walls, the problem was that the dangerous effects of leaded gas and asbestos weren't well-known at the time.

Maybe you should elaborate on what you believe isn't well-known about Facebook that warrants an antitrust lawsuit.

You're ignoring that there often simply aren't that many viable choices. And the company that offers something you care about a lot may also do something you hate a lot.

For example:

iOS: Better for privacy than Android but less open to sideloaded apps

Android: Sends tons of data to Google about all kinds of things. Furthermore Google bricked one of my old Android phones by disabling the DNS for the authentication server so I could no longer sign into the phone. (It was too old to support Cyanogen).

Samsung: The last Samsung S-series smartphone in my house had apps pre-loaded on it including Blockbuster (it wasn't that many years ago) that could not be removed without loading new firmware or something. I guess Tizen is open source so theres that? But then again Samsung is one of the most cruel companies on Earth with a long track record of polluting, worker abuse, and blatantly copying others products and inside deals with the government to look the other way.

Microsoft: Abandoned the entire space. Was basically a copycat product with a UI based on squares anyway.

Essential Phone: Dead on arrival

Palm: Got left behind. Missed the whole app store wave

Blackberry: Wasn't really designed for non-business users with all kinds of upcharges for Blackberry data services. Missed the whole app store wave. Pivoted into automotive software after they couldn't keep up

So sure its easy to critique Apple for this or Google for that but ultimately what are the other options that can realistically compete with the above megacorps?

All you're telling me is that there are no choices that you like. All of those are viable choices (except the ones that literally don't exist anymore), and there were many more viable choices before FAANG began their dominance that consumers saw and abandoned in favor of the dominant products we have today.

Not that I don't know how you feel, there are areas where I hate all the options too. I don't always get what I want, that's life. It would be perverse for me to force legions of others to dedicate their efforts towards what I would like instead.

That was really well phrased - there are options, but just because you don’t like them doesn’t mean you get to force other people to make something you do like.

I didn't say people should be forced to make something.

I was responding to the other person's argument that you can simply not buy products like Apple's to show you don't like their lack of openness. My point was that all of the available products have different drawbacks so its not so simple as "don't buy Apple" when there are only a few options left from monopolies and they all have similar issues.

But on the other hand if a majority of us feel this way and the free market doesn’t seem to be doing the job, then that is the job of government and regulation - that is our voice.

Of course, an obvious counter-example is the Defense Production Act, which allows the government to force other people to make something they like.

No. You said "just don't buy it" if you don't like it. But I need a smartphone. So I'm going to buy one. My point is if they all have different drawbacks (this one is better for "openness", that one is better for privacy, this one is better for security) then saying people should just not buy Apple to protest one decision isn't helpful. Because by doing that I would probably end up needing to buy an Android phone which means I would give up other things like privacy. And then if I mention that you'll say we should have just not bought Google phones.

Well yeah. But yeah they control the market. So you buy the least evil product you can that is fairly priced and works with all your other stuff.

Or just blame the consumer cause they didn't choose the mythical Linux phone with great battery life and no spyware.

Again, you just don't like your options. You've decided that our modern smartphones are evil and also decided that you must have a smartphone.

I'm not here to tell you that you should have just not bought X phone, I'm here to tell you that you have a choice as a consumer to buy what you want, and if you don't want anything available, that's not anyone's problem.

For millions of consumers, an Android phone or iPhone or Samsung phone is a great option and is largely what they really want. The phones that people buy today are phones that most people have repeatedly chosen over others, including some phones you may have liked. Sorry you don't like the current choices, society has never owed anyone a mythical Linux phone. If you want something that doesn't exist, make it yourself or convince other consumers to buy it as well so companies find it worth their while. Go buy Purism. Don't whine to the government that it's not fair you can't get a mythical Linux phone.

Lol I never whined about not getting a mythical Linux phone. I don't even want one particularly.

My point was that your claim to "just not buy it" doesn't work when its an essential item in modern society like food, water, housing, or a computer.

Its easy to sit here from your armchair and say "well if dumb consumers hadn't bought smartphones like this then we wouldn't have them so they shouldn't complain." But you, of course, have a smartphone from one of these manufacturers because like everyone else you realized you basically need one these days if you work or travel. We created rules that favor tech mega corps and now they dominate the industry.

So your "solution" isn't really a solution. You say people should have made some amazingly insightful decision to boycott all smartphones fifteen years ago but since they didn't we are stuck with the brands we have and its the consumers' fault...

It does work, you just don't like the results. Most consumers have gotten exactly what they wanted. I never said everyone should have boycotted all smartphones, I said that if consumers didn't like the smartphones we have they wouldn't have bought them. They practiced "just don't buy it" for all the other dead tech options that no longer exist today. Consumers clearly don't believe that there is a problem that needs a "solution".

Let me be clear: it's your problem to deal with as a minority consumer who apparently doesn't like anything most other consumers like. The tech world we live in today is the world that most consumers want and are happy with. You are stuck with the brands we have, the rest of the consumer market have bought the smartphones that they've happily, willingly and repeatedly chosen.

Whatever you may think of the tech industry, it very closely reflects what most consumers want. If you want something no one else wants, make it or evangelize, asking the government to forcibly change outcomes is awful.

Nobody wants a phone that doesn't allow them to add a third party app. They tolerate it due to lack of choice because the device still provides exceptional utility.

Why is it so hard to understand?

I like my iPhone. I worked at Apple. I still recognize its limitations. I'm not going to go without a phone to make a point to a $2 trillion company.

Because people do want a phone that doesn't allow them to add a third party app? A lot of people want Apple's walled garden to effectively make their choices for them and stop them from installing malicious garbage. They don't want to care or be conscious of the security decisions that users of more open platforms have to make.

I'm not saying I like what Apple does, but I do recognize that the majority of consumers want the sort of locked down experience that Apple provides.

I don't expect you to make a point to a trillion dollar company, I expect you to recognize that Apple became a trillion dollar company because consumers really want what they're making, as locked down as it is.

I've bought tons of iPhones. You can imply that I want a walled garden. But I don't and I've never met anyone who claimed they did.

Its an Apple marketing point. Its not why people buy iPhones.

I can believe you've never met them, but there they are. And they don't outright say they "like walled gardens" or something like that, they just love everything about the walled garden experience the iPhone provides them. You can even spot some of them in this thread, they want Apple to decide how much privacy they have, they want Apple to control and vet every app they install, they want Apple to limit what other software can do on their devices in ways that you can't limit in open platforms.

And it only matters when it's backed by a purchasing decision. Someone can swear up and down that they hate walled gardens a lot but words mean nothing; if they turn around and purchase an iPhone over the plenty of open alternatives, it only signals that either they don't know what a walled garden is or they care about other stuff far more. Actually paying money for something cuts through all the bullshit consumers say to their friends or the internet about what they really want and what their priorities are.

Markets don't give each individual consumer precisely what they want, they give large groups of consumers what they want weighted by consumer priorities. In that way, most consumers get what they really want. Obviously that means some consumers don't get what they want and perhaps that's you, I don't always get what I want either. But sorry, if most consumers really wanted a device without a walled garden, they wouldn't have willingly and repetitively bought iPhones over more open devices. If there were a large consumer group of people that really want a good device without a walled garden and are willing back up their desires by paying for one, businesses will be aching to take their money. In fact, there already are many open alternatives that serve these people well. According to you your iPhone has issues even though you own one, but evidently these issues are so minor that you won't even give alternatives your money to avoid them. "But I really don't like it" is worth as much as it cost to say that, which is absolutely nothing.

You still somehow don’t get it so I’ll explain it very, very simply.

My iPhone has THOUSANDS of features. Battery life, interoperability with other devices, reliability, familiarity, particular apps that I’ve purchased already, and hundreds of other reasons all contribute to why I like one smartphone brand over another.

And yes access to third party apps is one of those thousands of contributing factors but ultimately I’m not going to buy a phone that has a crappy battery and doesn’t work with any of my other devices just so I can download a couple extra cool apps without the App Store. Besides I can jailbreak this iPhone (at a privacy risk since I have to flash the whole firmware) and run sideloaded apps if I want to but it’s usually not necessary.

So you keep equating making a choice based on thousands of variables with a large scale consumer endorsement of one particular variable which is not at all scientific or logical.

For the average consumer, the fact that they have $200 in iOS apps they’ve already purchased over the last decade and their entire family is on Macs and iPhones that have generally been reliable is enough reason to stay with another iPhone. They’re not thinking about walled gardens when they’ve probably never even realized the distinction.

Every other iPhone alternative has thousands of features as well, they're all very competitive with an iPhone yet don't have such a locked down system. Smartphones that no longer exist also had thousands of features, that didn't stop consumers from abandoning them.

There's only so many ways you can tell me you care so little about walled gardens that it ranks below about a thousand features that you actually base your purchasing decision on. Let me explain it very, very simply: I and many others actually give a shit about walled gardens, we actually make purchasing decisions based on that by not buying Apple. I personally refuse to buy Apple devices for myself that are incredibly locked down and limited and so intentionally incompatible with every other device on the market; Oh, that describes every single Apple device including the very first iPhones since before Apple became a trillion dollar company by selling a billion iPhones. You and millions of others could have made a similar decision but you didn't, you found about a thousand other things more important.

Over countless choices of countless combinations of thousands of features from companies all vying for more money and attention, consumers have consistently demonstrated that walled gardens are not just a very distant concern that they won't bother paying for, it's often a desirable choice and a top priority amongst many consumers who openly desire features & limitations that are only possible in Apple's locked down walled garden.

I don't think it's helpful to continue this conversation any further. I find your depiction of consumers to be hopelessly out of touch and I think it's kind of pathetic to claim that walled gardens are important yet find a thousand other reasons to ignore it. Every purchasing decision is a trade-off, not everyone gets literally every last thing their heart desires, nor should they because that's a waste of resources. Consumers get what they really want, the market has done well to ensure that, and evidently you've fulfilled your top thousand most desired features in a phone with Apple too.

Calling for the government to step in and override the choices of millions of consumers is the last thing I want, even if it runs contrary to my own consumer choices.

What phone do you use?

You care very strongly about the walled garden so much so that you’ll ignore thousands of other compromises compared to other devices that you may not like. That’s rare, but you’re on Hacker News so of course you aren’t like normal people when choosing a phone. You can’t assume most people will do what you do when they haven’t even heard of the walled garden issue so it literally could not be on their list of considerations.

I’m guessing I could say you don’t care about privacy or usability or something else based on your phone choice. But you’d say no I care about not having a wallet garden and thats why I chose it. Well in the same way most people didn’t choose to have a walled garden. They went to the store and bought one of the most popular phones and regardless of brand all their apps came from an App Store so they didn't even know the difference when they were deciding between other compromises like price, availability, network, battery life, ease of use, etc.

In fact, most these people never had an App Store before their iPhone so it seemed like an extra thing no one else had instead of a locked down Apple monopoly. Hindsight is 20/20.

None of these people would be upset if you put in a power user setting to allow third party apps. They wouldn’t even know it was there. So don’t say they “chose” that they didn’t want it. You can’t say people chose to ban something they don’t even know exists.

I use a Google Pixel. You can definitely say I don't care about data collection/privacy because I don't. You can also say I care less about usability than I do about walled gardens / software limitations because that's true.

Of course it's rare to prioritize walled gardens, that's the point. That's why the industry is like this. No one really cares about walled gardens, they don't care about it enough for them to make any real decisions about it.

People don't go "I really want a walled garden", they just say "I really want a phone that does and chooses everything for me" and proceed to buy a locked down device that applies restrictions that are only possible in a locked down platform.

By the way, Android already does put in a power user setting to allow third party apps. They're still being sued by Epic, and Google believes that allowing third party stores are needed to resolve potential antitrust issues (Google has started working on this). I'd be very surprised if antitrust action doesn't tread similar ground with Apple, and you can bet that all the people who liked & supported Apple's iron fist are going to start complaining if a bunch of popular apps move to their own app stores to keep their revenue cut.

You said: People don't go "I really want a walled garden".

So you admit after all this my exact point in the first place. Almost nobody is deciding based on this because there are thousands of other things that are either more important, easier to understand, more talked about in marketing and reviews, or simply because they've never even heard that some are walled gardens and some aren't. Clearly someone who has never had a smartphone before wouldn't choose based on specifics of the App Store when they're probably trying to figure out how to make a phone call.

No, I said that people don't say something as obvious as "I really want a walled garden", they express their desire for a walled garden through action and by wanting things that are only possible through a walled garden. People want Apple to make their decisions for them, that's a vote for Apple's walled garden.

"Walled garden" is just some jargon that some of us use to describe this kind of platform. Consumers have long been familiar with the concept of a platform that is locked down and makes decisions for you. "Walled garden" isn't a magic phrase that one needs to utter in order to want.

> Nobody wants a phone that doesn't allow them to add a third party app. They tolerate it due to lack of choice because the device still provides exceptional utility.

No, people DO want phones like that. You are in a niche group of users that don’t want it. Most iPhone users and even many developers love the walled garden and the security and quality it brings with it.

You're assuming that. Apple may position it as a feature but I've never heard one person say they want that. You're making a big jump simply because they buy the phone. Look you could make it so most software goes through the store but no one wants their own program to need to get approved to go on their own device. Clearly.

Our governments are empowered to change behaviors by threat of force, but we're letting corporations conduct an authoritarian insurgency within our national borders while libertarian apologists cry "free markets" and "consumer choice".

There is no choice and the markets for highly sophisticated technologies are not free or efficient. It's farcical.

If the government really believed that FAANG is conducting an authoritarian insurgency within our national borders, they wouldn't be pursuing antitrust. If that's what you want to argue, fine, but it's not relevant to antitrust action discussed here.

There is plenty of choice, many of which I'm happy with and many of which I'm not. I think it's farcical to say that there is no choice, millions of consumers have chosen freely without coercion from many options. The choices we have today are options that consumers have chosen willingly and repeatedly over other options that no longer exist.

> Consumers should come first before massive corporations.

No one can come first. If the terms aren’t mutually agreeable, the other will not participate in a transaction. They don’t have to make things to sell you just like you don’t have to buy from them. It can’t work any other way.

Yes, consumers and society come first before the corporations that serve them. The corporations only exist to provide, only survive because they do.

Free markets and capitalism are great, the best system we have, but there are still guardrails to ensure proper behavior and mitigate harm. This is the problem being discussed. The balance in recent times is completely off with these massive software/internet companies that control so much of our lives with little oversight or accountability. This is what people are arguing against, and I believe you would agree with that.

"draconian government takeover of private corporations"

It's not a takeover, it's a break up of business units.

When these units operate together, they enable a kind of power otherwise unachievable.

Carriers and Mobile device makers play incredibly anti-competitive games all the time in the fight for market share.

It's almost surreal. The carriers were pretty bad before smartphones, now it's Android+iOS.

Large entities can play all sorts of games like forcing their buyers into exclusivity, requiring them to not carry competitive devices all sorts of things.

Microsoft is a classic example with Office: they can integrate their software into their OS in a manner they don't afford to competitors, thereby leveraging their OS monopoly, into other monopolies, which in the long run is bad for business.

Platforms have an inherent aspect to them which makes us want to have fewer players, but there still should be more diversity.

Remember feature phones? There were plenty of choices. And buying one, did not lock you into the next one. They were not 'platforms' there were 1000 varieties even if there were some 'big players' (ie Nokia).

There are actually some consumer benefits when vertical integration is done well, and there is pricing competition - which is why I think that the desktop market is fair.

Apple is being a 'good capitalist' on the Mac side - great innovation - and choice.

The issue with Facebook is an entirely different issue, I don't even think it's one of 'anti competitive' behaviour - the real issue is a little bit political and it's about the control of information, liability, content filtering, 'truth' etc.. That's where that discussion is focused.

If I were 'Capitalist God' I wouldn't break up Apple but I would force them to allow open distribution of apps, while allowing certain measures for security, and of course, transportability of personal data from all apps, all vendors, including Apple. Similarly to Google with their services and Android.

With Facebook and content, requiring them to have a completely independant panel for content filtering, with some kind of objective oversight (like a board, but not corporate), where FB gets to set pretty much any policy they want, but that Board/Panel ensures that there's fair and consistent application of those policies to the content.

Much like Banks are regulated: they have to have 'firewalls' between their buy and sell side operations to avoid conflict of interest.

Finally, some rules about channel ownership and exclusivity - so that Apple/Android can't join in with AT&T/Verizon to basically cut every little other vendor in the world out.

Honestly, what I just described just as an example is not deeply interventional, and it would allow those businesses to thrive mostly the same while giving users more choice, privacy, allow business to set their own content guidelines and wash their hands of politicians thinking 'their party is treated unfairly' because it's literally and independent body doing the filtering equitably, and it would let smaller players with actually decent products into the playing field.

What right does Apple have to make hundreds of billions dollars and to continually abuse their wealth for more power? You act as though Apple is suffering. It's pretty ridiculous.

This isn't a draconian government takeover. It's to prevent a company, of all things, becoming more powerful than many governments in the world. Companies have no allegiance to the people and must be checked.

> Support free products with your wallet instead

That's not how society works. Humans can be abused and manipulated and deceived. I have seen scenarios in which Apple was a customer of another company. Apple was incredibly abusive in many ways, and this was toward a billion dollar plus company. How do you think Apple treats or cares about others, including its own customers?

> What right does Apple have to make hundreds of billions dollars and to continually abuse their wealth for more power?

The same right that literally every other private entity has to use their existing wealth and power to gain more?

> This isn't a draconian government takeover.

Oh, for all intents and purposes it absolutely is - you are giving the government enough power to corral and coerce corporations into doing their bidding. See the ridiculously unethical actions the Trump administration is taking against TikTok after they ruined his Tulsa rally, for example.

> Companies have no allegiance to the people and must be checked.

And governments do? Governments abuse their power to the maximum extent legally possible all the time. Often, they go further. A cursory reading of United States history will show you that the government is not your friend, it never was, and at every moment possible it is also vying for more power, more control, more surveillance.

As long as Apple has not turned into a monopoly there isn’t really a concern here. There is an available market for the products you want. Just because they are not as capable as the ones Apple makes, does not mean you get to coerce Apple into doing your bidding.

> > Support free products with your wallet instead

> That's not how society works.

But it is. There is a flourishing community around libre products. The PinePhone has been a hit. There are large communities around reasonably open Android phones.

It’s not that they need a right to trade beyond a certain amount, it’s that you don’t have the right to stop them. Why do you think you can dictate who can buy and sell from who, especially on the basis that they are somehow too good at it?

> it’s that you don’t have the right to stop them

I don't, but the government does if they are doing so in a harmful way that violates laws and agreements.

> Why do you think you can dictate who can buy and sell from who, especially on the basis that they are somehow too good at it?

Again, I don't think anything of the sort. I didn't say that. And they aren't being punished for being "too good" at what they do. They are, or will hopefully be, punished because they are good but then they abused that to be even better. It's the abuse that's the problem.

Really? What specific laws and or agreements did they violate?

Then don’t buy their products. It’s not difficult.

Whether or not one has the right to computing freedom is irrelevant. The federal government has the unquestioned authority to set the rules for interstate and international commerce. Breaking them up is not a takeover, by definition, since the government will not end up as the owners of those businesses. It is a restructuring of the market in furtherance of our goal of a free market economy based on fair rules and equality before the law.

Further, pushing responsibility onto individual consumers to (somehow) shape the market "with their wallet" is absurd. The highest purpose of a public government is that it can serve to protect the common folk from the abuses of concentrated wealth. Asking regulators to do their job isn't coercive, it's corrective.

> Why don’t you buy from Purism instead?

Because I don't want to spend twice the price of an iphone for something less useful than a flip phone. Freedom preserving devices will always struggle to reach the level of usability of the first iphone.

Just because the product you want doesn’t exist, does not mean you get to coerce a company into making it for you.

That’s just life. Sometimes you don’t get what you want. I want my phone to be a toaster - I have as much right as you do to make Apple implement what I want - that is to say, no right at all.

In theory you can do what ever you want if the majority agree. If the majority of people think Apple should be required to respect user freedoms then the government will regulate it and they will have to unless they plan to retaliate in some way which is unlikely if the government and supporter group is big enough.

The government is a powerful tool for improving the world when applied correctly.

Too late, the free product producers don't stand a chance against the big players. Neither feature wise, performance wise nor the whole ecosystem. And governments forcing rules upon private companies is the base of a free market to prevent oligopolies and give new players a chance.

I think the case could be made that purism and similar companies are not playing on a level playing field.

Think for example about regulations regarding cellphone number portability. They supported porting a phone number to switch providers fostered competition and lowered cellphone rates. (not perfect, but much better than before)

Without that regulation new or smaller companies - even those providing better service or lower rates - could not get customers because of simple shenanigans.

(Is Purism really even shipping? I ordered in 2017 and haven't gotten mine)

I didn't see anything in the post you're replying to about a draconian government takeover.

Government has been intervening (in some industries) in these ways for decades. It works. It's not arbitrary.

It's not perfect of course, but it's far better than allowing large companies to get a complete stranglehold.

It seems to me that if you want to claim some version of "leave the marketplace alone and it will self correct" then you have to make a pretty strong case. It's not a self evident truth, history tells a different story.

Sometimes the marketplace takes care of itself, sure, but there have been lots of examples where it hasn't. In those cases, when government has stepped in, the outcome has generally been positive (if sometimes short lived).

My assumption is that any US lawsuits against US tech companies are just song-and-dance to maintain US technological hegemony worldwide while also looking like we're doing something.

I don't know if it is quite so meaningless. But I doubt the US government is going to do something to give us more power over our technology. The Feds successfully threatened to shut down an entire social network this year. They don't want to lose that power. They do care about mass media and how people discover information, however. They will take action to make sure the wrong information is not being shared widely.

The problem is Apple actually makes quality products. I personal don’t buy Apple products anymore for the reasons you have listed, and am transitioning from my iPhone 7 to my newly purchased pine phone. However, from both the standpoint of an engineer and a consumer I’m continually impressed by the quality of the products Apple makes. Not as impressed as I was when I got my first Mac in 2007 bu despite conducting the same shady business practices that have landed others in hot water, as long as Apple makes quality products I doubt any antitrust “changes” will be more than symbolic in-practice.

I’m all for putting pressure on them with antitrust lawsuits but ultimately consumers are who will drive meaningful change

Breaking up tech companies would be using a 20th century tool on a 21st century problem.

Andrew Yang had a better idea. Put a VAT on big tech and use that to fund UBI.

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/value-added-tax/

Why not try both?

It makes perfect sense. Tech enjoys massive benefits from scalability and from eating up competition. It's easy to use both - break them up, then tax the shit out of them so that they can't grow into leviathans as fast.

It comes down to power. Studios don't own theatres because they aren't powerful enough to lobby for that, but if were more profitable for studios and theatres to be vertically integrated (spoiler alert: it would), then you'd bet it'd happen. Maybe Disney will take the lead on that one.

Look, I don't like it either, but common people have statistically insignificant impact on whether or not legislation is passed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig&t=60

Huh? Studios are probably the most powerful lobbyist on the planet, otherwise mickey mouse would be out of copyright. And we shoukdnt have the dmca fiasco.

Studios don't own theatres because they lost an anti-trust case last century (United States v Paramount Pictures) and have been prohibited from owning theaters since, although the DOJ moved to end that last year, and it's now in a two year sunset period.

Well, maybe, only the studios listed in the original consent decree were strictly prohibited, but nobody else did it, because they would risk being added, and lose their investment in theaters.

> They wouldn't even allow studios to own theaters

The DOJ recently convinced a federal judge to terminate the consent decrees that prevented studios from owning theaters: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-court-terminates-para...

> It required Microsoft to innovate more - and look where they are now!

Arguably things went seriously downhill with Windows 8 and culminated in the horror that is W10: ads everywhere, invasive tracking that can't be made to shut up for good, extremely ugly redesign.

> extremely ugly redesign

I’ll never get how people can argue that older versions of Windows are more aesthetically pleasing than windows 10. I don’t use Windows (and haven’t since XP) but even I think 10 looks better than, say, Windows 7s fat task bar.

Although I can actually say with a straight face I think most default Linux DEs look better than Windows for the first time in my life.

I have always turned off all that redesign nonsense in XP and 7.

There's a reason that the Win95 look is so iconic and "timeless": it's clear, consistent and simple. Windows 10 is a fucking hot mess, made worse by the fact that Microsoft for whatever dumb reason wanted the same UI on mobile and desktop, and the result was the worst possible outcome.

I only use Windows for gaming, or old .NET Framework projects. But man Windows 10 is SOOOOOOO much more visually appealing than any other version of windows to date. And better visually than most linux distros.

And I really don't know what this 'ads everywhere' crap people keep talking about.

It's hard to miss the fact that Windows 10 pre-installs Candy Crush and your start menu looks like this:

https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ximg_57...

From https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-windo...

Meanwhile my android phone comes with youtube preinstalled, mandatory, and it tries to upsell me on YT premium multiple times a day.

Or premium photo service.

Oh and my phone randomly shows me ads, from Google, for their photo printing service.

Maps now has ads.

I'll remove the link to candy crush and not let it bother me, but I can't stop the YT premium ads.

Ads are not present on Windows Pro IIRC. Something like that. Just a simple price discrimination.

Ah I’ve never seen home edition!

Amazon being able to undercut the entire retail market while peddling counterfeits is abhorrent. It isn't even financially possible to compete with them given barriers to entry considering their retail operates at a loss while AWS subsidizes them.

Good points indeed, albeit a tad hard language for this forum. Definitely upvoting this

Why?you last a lot of things that you think sous be done, but don't give any reason. Why is it absurd? Why does it have to stop?

"What the fuck? Are we just going to let them soak up the entire economy?"

Looks that way. No leadership to stop it.

The nature of the apple ecosystem is a boon to consumers, not a hinderance. I don't really give a #$!@$ about your profits as an iPhone developer. I care that google isn't sniffing all of my personal data, that I don't get viruses or phished, and that my phone just works.

Compare Apple to PCs. Windows is, has been, and always will be a security sh*tshow. Linux isn't interesting enough to scammers to be a security target yet, but it sure is ugly and chaotic. Apple just works for me.

By forcing Apple to be open, you're trying to both turn it into Linux by taking away the quality and usability of the apps available, and into Windows by .. making it a security shitshow.

Nobody has ever given me a real argument as to how Apple harms consumers in the iPhone. The only argument seems to be that app developers want a free ride. They want full access to do whatever they want, consumers be damned, without paying into the infrastructure which made their market available. (techno-libertarianism strikes again?)

> Go after Apple next. They're the worst of the lot.

Really?

Facebook has contributed to ethnic cleansing in places where Facebook has such a dominant position that it is practically synonymous with the Internet. Facebook’s responses to this have been slow and lack oversight, with Facebook themselves saying they failed.

- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-facebook...

- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/07/facebook-...

How on earth can you arrive at the conclusion that Apple are the “worst of the lot” because they won’t let you run the software you want and they are getting involved in movie/tv production? Those are quite literally first world problems compared with the harm Facebook does.

But people were accessing Facebook on Google and Apple devices — so who’s to blame really?

It's completely absurd to suggest that Apple should be moderating what users post to facebook.

Is it? Apple controls the keyboard and camera. Why only prevent terrorism or child pornography at the app-level when you can stop it at the os level?

You seem confused. Go use Linux or something. There is plenty of choice.

> Make Apple pay Epic and all the companies it hurts on the App Store.

Don’t make me barf. This is stupid. I hate to be so, well, blunt, but you can’t be hurt by an App Store, maybe if you don’t like it you can create your own?

Apple (and they aren’t unique in this - Wal-Mart, Amazon, Steam, Epic, Nintendo, you name it) created a place for people to sell products. Without that creation, that market doesn’t exist. I’d you want to “punish” Apple then sure they can pay the developers and then all the developers can pay back all the profits they made on top of iOS.

> maybe if you don’t like it you can create your own

But that's the point. You can't.

Imagine Wal-Mart sold fridges and forced you to buy every item you put into that fridge at Wal-Mart.

And maybe that Xbox you bought at Wal-Mart required you to buy (and pay for) your Xbox live pass through Wal-Mart.

Yep. I also can’t create a Wal-Mart, or an AirBnB, or Netflix, or Disney. So what?

Why do I have to pay Microsoft to play via Xbox Live? Why can’t I set up my own online service to play games on their hardware?

Paying for Xbox Live in order to access games with matchmaking/sometimes dedicated servers on Microsoft resources and services (because that's what you're paying for)? Sure! But somebody who wants to play a game with non-platform crossplay, like Rocket League or something like Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, absolutely should not have to pay for Xbox Live, and I don't see why that would be controversial.

Alright. When you see them, please forward me all the articles clamoring for making Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, or others to do so. Btw why exactly do I need to get approval from Steam to sell games on their store? Why can’t I sell World of Warcraft gold on eBay, and why does Epic have a monopoly on the marketplace for Fortnite?

Better yet, why do I need Wal-Mart’s approval to sell anything?

"Oh but nobody's talking about this other shitty thing so everything must be permitted" is...certainly a way to approach the world, but not one to which I subscribe. Nor should you.

And Steam doesn't, and in fact cannot, prevent you from installing GOG Galaxy or downloading games from itch.io. (And devices like the Steam Link will happily play games sourced from GOG Galaxy or itch.io through them!)

This is tiresome. I will not reply to you further.

Again, why do I have to follow their rules for their App Store?

> Why do I have to pay Microsoft to play via Xbox Live?

Exactly! If you bought your Xbox through Apple, you'd be paying Apple a chunk for the privilege of using a Microsoft service. See the issue?

...no because this doesn’t make any sense. If you bought your Xbox through Apple for some reason it would be similar to buying it from Best Buy... where Microsoft still has a monopoly on Xbox Live services.

But that is what is happening right now!

If you purchase a Netflix subscription from the Netflix app that you got from the Apple store (replace Netflix with Xbox here to see the comparability), Apple takes 30% every single month. Never mind the fact that you might be using the Netflix account on your non-Apple TV or laptop.

Apple also ensures that you can't buy it through Netflix directly, you have to buy it through them. You would have to purchase the subscription outside of the Netflix app.

Yes, because Apple provides the platform and you discovered Netflix through the App Store. If it’s a problem you can just not have your app on the store or, as Netflix is doing, not have people sign up via the App Store.

Why shouldn’t Apple get what amounts to a referral fee here?

> Why shouldn’t Apple get what amounts to a referral fee here?

Why should they? I feel like you are not getting the point that everyone is trying to make to you. Maybe if I throw a few more examples at you. Otherwise I give up...

If I buy a smart TV at Wall-Mart, Wall-Mart gets a 'referral' fee for the TV but not for the Netflix subscription I use on that TV.

If I buy an Xbox at Wall-Mart, Wall-Mart gets a 'referral' fee for the Xbox but not for the Xbox live subscription I run on that console.

If I buy a physical copy of Adobe Photoshop at Wall-Mart, Wall-Mart gets a 'referral' fee for the purchase but does not get a cut when I sign up to Adobe's CS subscription each year (because at that point there is no more 'referral' going on!).

If I buy a fridge at Wall-Mart I am allowed to purchase my groceries I put in it from stores other than Wall-Mart. Imagine if Wall-Mart set up a system to block any non-Wall-Mart purchased groceries from going into the fridge? Then you'd be forced to pay a 'referral' fee to Wall-Mart every time you want to use your device. No one could set up a competing store to sell you groceries for your Wall-Mart fridge.

How can you "create an App Store" for iOS devices?

I don't even think Apple's doing anything I don't like, and I gotta throw a flag on this pseudoargument.

Have you heard of Android?

Ah. So it's not "you can create an alternative app store for the devices that customers and not Apple owns", but you can create an entire new hardware stack on which to run applications, and then put an app store on that.

Compelling.

Well, it is quite compelling. You want to single out Apple but ignore how this has been going on since, well, almost the dawn of time.

There are plenty of phone manufacturers with different operating systems. If you don’t like using Apple’s App Store you are perfectly free to use other hardware and software combinations as you see fit to purchase that are available on the market.

There are plenty of hardware manufacturers that are free to spend as much money as they want to build phones, spend money to build operating systems, and then do whatever they want with those systems. So yes, create your own hardware stack on which to put applications and then put an App Store on that. Apple had the foresight to do so and create market value, nothing is stopping Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Google, or others from doing so. Nothing.

There are plenty of phone manufacturers with different operating systems on which you cannot distribute software outside of their approved method? Gosh, I didn't know that, but y'know, I'm OK with hitting them with the hammer, too.

And the fun part is this: I made my first post in this thread having in the past said that I really didn't mind the status quo but you've successfully convinced me that that hammer should be swung at them as hard as it possibly can be.

Opposite for me. The more people complain about Apple on hacker news or elsewhere because they aren’t making enough money and have to play by the App Store rules the more I know it’s the right thing and the more likely I am to buy an iPhone or new Mac. Especially because the arguments are so inconsistent and just come from generic mindshare. People don’t think. Apple Big! Apple bad! Conveniently ignoring that their business practices bring benefits to customers, they have extremely high brand loyalty and approvals, and are making money because people buy iPhones precisely because of the opposite reasons that you espouse here.

I don’t get it. If you hate the iPhone and apple App Store philosophy why can’t you just buy a different phone? Put your money where your mouth is. Apple and the App Store suck? Prove it with your purchases. Don’t sit here and complain about a “monopoly” that makes developers a shit load of money.

Ok how about this. If developers want a different store, they can all pay a fee to Apple to continue to develop new hardware and provide updates for iOS. Sounds fair to me.

You don't even need to compare Apple to other OEMs. Compare Apple to itself. On macOS, despite increasingly more stringent security policies, you are free to install apps and software outside of the App Store. Why should iOS be different? Why the inconsistency across Apple's own platforms? Is iOS somehow less secure than desktop and must only go through the App Store?

It’s easier to jailbreak than complain.

Non sequitur. That doesn’t explain any of the inconsistencies.

Because one is a phone and the other is a computer? Or maybe because people want the two devices to be treated differently? Why would they be the same? I can’t install whatever I want on my Sony TV or my car. Why does an iPhone specifically have to do this?

Smartphones are much more advanced computing devices than televisions or cars, to the point that they are a government-subsidized good for low-income citizens that was only recently ended by Ajit Pai (the Lifeline program). Perhaps modern basic necessities shouldn't be locked?

Also, as others in this thread have pointed out, there's nothing saying that game consoles should be special and should be subject to digital locks. By the same token, perhaps there should be nothing preventing smart TVs and cars from being locked as well.

Don't forget that if you do such a thing you forfeit the ability to use the google play services which make up about 50% of what people consider an android phone to be.

Google does not allow you to have an alternative store preinstalled.

Also for Amazon, Walmart, CVS, Costco... Disallow white label products. They just learn about products, copy, undercut then crush them due to distribution. Its anti-competition and demotivates new advances.

No way; generic products are a boon to affordability.

You'll see a hell of a fight if you try to take "No Name" from Canadians.

Which one is worse? Costco shelfing it followed by a generic replacement once the consolidated volume is high enough to achieve a crazy margin profile, Walmart using the bill of materials to alter the product in a way that achieves a particular customer goal (like all-in cost) or Amazon paying nothing but requesting meeting after meeting and demo after demo ahead of a potential acquisition and (maybe sometimes maybe never) stealing your idea basically full bore and competing with you?

What's so special about computers?

Should car manufacturers be forced to use interoperable wheels, lights and other proprietary components? Maybe so.

Take a basic 36V drill, companies such as Black and Decker and Dewalt use different methods to lock the battery onto the accessory. Should the government also mandate these are interoperable?

The list goes on - construction tools, consumer electronics, appliances, etc.

To what extent should the government force industries to do things?

By the way, I personally would love if the answer to the questions above were yes, but I wonder how successful the government would be in pursing these things.

> By the way, I personally would love if the answer to the questions above were yes

I was about to say... :)

Remember when cell phones all used proprietary adapters and you had to buy expensive chargers if you lost yours? This is one of the great things governments can do to protect us. (I think we owe Europe for that one.)

If your solution to creating margin is being anti-competitive / anti-consumer, there's something fundamentally wrong.

It’s not actually anti-consumer to create products that people want.

> It’s not actually anti-consumer to create products that people want.

Big tobacco.

And that's a great analogy. And just like tobacco might be something the consumer wants, it's bad for the broader system.

Apple is creating negative externalities that ripple across our industry, all the while bringing smiles to consumers that don't know about the cost.

Tobacco is clearly not analogy by your own argument, since tobacco harms the user. Are you claiming Apple harms its users?

Apple creates fewer negative externalities than any of their competitors. This is well documented.

I don’t see how this analogy works.

> Are you claiming Apple harms its users?

Yes!

The people building the future that don't happen to work at Apple have to work that much harder. They are less productive because of the toll Apple extracts.

App Store rules, policy conformance, release restrictions, and Apple tax impose a huge overhead on everyone. There are higher order, dynamical impacts that tough even non-Apple users. (Kind of like secondhand smoke!)

Apple users are serving their device by surrendering freedoms to it. It should be the other way around. Apple users pay more, they get less, and the software delivered to them is 15% less good than it could be.

Competition can't get started or survive. The ocean is being over-fished, and natural evolution has been artificially controlled by one entity.

Apple users are worse off than in the parallel universe where App Store didn't happen.

I’m glad you said this:

“Apple users are worse off than in the parallel universe where App Store didn't happen.”

What you are saying here is that your argument is based on conjecture. There is no factual basis to it at all. This is literally a fantasy.

“App Store rules, policy conformance, release restrictions, and Apple tax impose a huge overhead on everyone.”

Only in a world where these things are not part of why Apple is successful.

These are not problems, they are solutions to the complex problem of creating a market in which consumers are willing to spend money on software.

This is not conjecture. It is a fact borne out by the huge amounts of money people do in fact spend on Apps.

We wouldn’t be having this discussion of Apple hadn’t created a marketplace people trust.

Believe it or not, I actually want a parallel universe where Apple isn’t the only trusted platform, and I want the alternative to be open, not just another giant corporation.

However, the only way to make that happen is is if we build the technologies to enable it.

We won’t be able to do that if the government regulates software distribution.

Not commenting on the proposals in this thread but a vast amount of regulation is precisely about protecting consumers from themselves.

That is also the argument for why Apple’s restrictions are beneficial.

If we create regulation it will end up reproducing all of the restrictions that Apple imposes, plus whatever else the government wants.

The biggest difference is that nobody will be able to compete with it, and even open source will be forced to comply.

I disagree. If all companies are forced to use the same components, it removes the incentive for companies to innovate on those components. Why bother building a better battery lock if you're not allowed to use it in your products without giving it to your competitors first?

What are you disagreeing with? I'm not advocating for the standardization of components - I'm just saying that there is nothing special about software standardization.

Apple is pretty ridiculous for what they've been doing. The M1 is pretty cool but jesus christ not only did it take them 2 years to fess up going "sorry we got caught that our keyboards were trash..." but they KEPT SELLING THEM! For the cost of an Apple product, that's downright unacceptable. Those should've been recalled on the spot. But oh no, Apple cant have a recall. Gimme a break. They only care about their consumers with endless pockets.

A bad keyboard doesn’t really justify an antitrust suit... even if we all did want the amazing 2012 keyboards back

No and I'm sorry I came of pretty hot headed there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com