Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal the End of Facebook | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Declared War on Apple, and It Just May Signal the End of Facebook

inc.com

172 pointsevo_9183 comments

The idea of doing a public campaign over this is so myopic that I cannot fathom the thinking about it. Who’s going to rally for Facebook? Did they really expected Apple to change this?

The ad should scare investors much more than Apple’s move.

They can’t hire people with good ideas anymore because as we know money isn’t a great motivator (and besides, there are more ethical companies within 10 miles paying as much or more than Facebook). They can’t hire good people anymore because their mission is naive and their reputation precedes them.

Tell that to John Carmack, who apparently is quite fine with tainting his legacy and wasting his last few good work years working for Facebook of all companies. And to top it all off, they're going to ruin Oculus, too (where Carmack is working), going by the latest moves in that division.

It would be very hard to “taint the legacy” of a person like Carmack.

He will be excellent no matter where he is because he is given essentially free reign to work on what he enjoys the most.

And if that changes it will be unlikely to be the company that did it, since a person in his position would just move to another company and re-acquire free reign.

I don’t usually complain about spelling, but you used it twice. It’s “free rein.”

https://grammarist.com/spelling/free-rein-free-reign/

Hehe, while you are usually quite correct in that spelling, in Carmack's case "free reign" may actually be more appropriate since he exercises pretty much sovereign power there!

I think he left (for all practical purposes) to focus on AGI now. There were rumors he didn’t like the way fb execs were planning of taking oculus. Think he’s still an advisor or similar, but spends his good time no longer there

Given what I learned when a friend purchased multiple Occulus, I think Fackbook really fucked up. Each unit has to be attached to a different Facebook account, and creating multiple Facebook accounts is forbidden. Bye bye having 2 units at home for when friends come over. They deserve to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under anti-trust laws.

He's only 50. How 'few good work years' do you think he has left?

Tuning as in investing billions of dollars to actually make it a feasible product?

Sure, they do bad moves there as well, but oculus is where it is purely because Facebook decided to burn billions of dollars there.

Anecdotal, but I’ve seen several folks get offers from FB and other big tech, and I’ve seen FB throw much more money at people. They also have better perks.

I think they know they need to use money to overcome their reputation.

In terms of pay, having compared offers before, one would be better of at Facebook than Google but tied with Apple. Apple has less perks but more monetary compensation to make up for it because their stock isn’t nearly the liability and Apple actually releases new products and services instead of sucking their existing property dry. Who would want to work at Facebook? There is literally nothing your company does worth getting excited to come to work for.

Huh I don’t know. Maybe the $200k salary for entry level developers is exciting? Or maybe it’s the ability to work on a product that is a household name for billions of people?

Yeah it’s very exciting to work on the best ways to spread misinformation, incite division and ruin democracy. Or maybe they’re pulled in by the charismatic CEO-bot?

The CIA still gets people excited to work for them so ruining democracy and spreading misinformation are certainty draws for the right people

You’re right. I would bet the CIA is at least a little less starry eyed about the “good” they do in the world, compared to Facebook engineers.

Working for Facebook doesn't have quit the social capital it used to. Besides there's a such thing as enjoying my and believing the work you do is valuable. If ultimately you can only trave your effort back to ad clicks, that's not very enticing.

You live in a bubble. 95% of the American public would hear that their son “got a job at Facebook” and think he made it. 95% of companies hiring developers would see “worked at Facebook” and move that resume to the top of the pile.

Finally someone with some perspective. Is it just me or is it just baffling at the amount of hubris there is in this thread? Its like there are two worlds, this small group of people who have no perspective whatsoever and the rest of the country having to deal with reality.

The rest of the country also has little positive sentiment for Facebook. They don't go so far as not to use it, but their opinion of it is not good.

Maybe it's because I don't live in an SV or other techie bubble that I see this, that I give more credit to the average person. Because I'm not stuck I'm an echo chamber of "general public are naive and don't care". They do care, they are more aware of some of these issues than you think. Assuming the only people who care or think about these issues are techies is an extremely condescending & patronizing view towards the average person.

Perhaps it helps broaden my view that live in a densely populated but not very techie/tech-company area and I have a large social circle of non techies. It shows me that your so-called bubble where hn/sv/techies make sweeping generalizations about the average person is often based in stereotypical fiction instead of reality. My age 65+ parents and in-laws couldn't tell you the difference between tcp & udp, setup a WiFi router, or understand the difference between a spreadsheet and a database or know what Full Stack means. But they have opinions on Facebook, and they aren't good. My few dozen coworkers of all ages are the same.

No, I live in a mostly non-techie social group with both Democrats and Republicans: they all view facebook negatively primarily through the lens of their political party.

Your own self-satisfied bubble of congratulatory "we techies are special and have a special perspective" bubble is blinding you. Ask anyone with a moderate interest in politics how they feel about facebook and the answer is mostly going to be "not great".

Most don't care enough to quit facebook, but as per the point of my original comment, facebook isn't going to have any sort of easy time whipping up public support against Apple for privacy issues they mostly don't care about one way or another.

A person would have to drink an awful lot of kool aid to think their work at Facebook is valuable to anyone but the Facebook shareholders.

Hey if your work on OSS infrastructure, it's not really that bad.

This is the thing. I don't like facebook, and they do a lot of bad things.

They also have some amount of good they do.

Very few things are purely good or purely bad, which should be a caution against all-or-nothing judgements. For example I think Apple is bad for inching its way towards an ever more restrictive MacOS. But I think Apple is good for its efforts to protect user privacy and give users more control over it. And as a FAANG, it's example puts pressure on other companies to compete on privacy as well. (Though I think we know Google will never go that way, unlike Apple their business model isn't based on hardware or software sales, but on the very private information Apple wants users to have control over)

So does the US govt. Does that mean you will reject a grant from them for your cancer cure or solar panel research? Less evil USians will die from cancer as a result potentially, along with the rest of the world.

That was the point of what I was saying.

Despite Facebooks evil, there is good that comes out of it.

I honestly don't know the answer to this: How much are people able to choose to work on OSS projects vs. being told "This is the project you're working on."

Also, OSS tech that's in service to ad tech may still not be enticing. Even if it's not directly used for ad tech, everything you would do for facebook would ultimately be for the purpose of ad tech. Rationalizing that your particular work has non ad-tech related applications seems like just that: a rationalization. Other companies offer OSS work opportunities, as well as the opportunity to carve out, say, 5-10 hours a month to the project of your choice regardless of your day job.

I'm not coming down on one side or the other of such a moral choice. I don't think things are that simple. I think it's a spectrum, and people should weight these things when making a decision, if they have the luxury of doing so.

And I have to say, at this point ad tech is probably only one of a few major problems with Facebook content. News feeds, memes, etc. that are rewarded with shared & likes for being the most inflammatory/emotionally manipulative are at this point at least as bad as micro-targeting of ads, and I personally think are much much worse.

Sure, but it's still not enough.

FB recruiters are super aggressive and I have zero qualms unloading on them for their BS behavior, every. time. I've asked five (5!) times to be taken off their list and added to a blacklist for candidates and I still get emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages. The first two "buzz-off" messages were polite, but now I'm just downright rude and respond with my actual opinion on their employer (and subsequently what I think about them working for that employer).

Facebook is a bad company that does bad things. If you work there, you're gross.

I’ve had the same issue with Google recruiters. I imagine they copy each other’s tactics. One time they asked why I turned them down; I was more than happy to respond. Haven’t heard back since.

The recruiters are the same people so of course they use the same tactics. The average tenure of a recruiter is 1-2 years.

Now I'm actually somewhat curious what the career of a recruiter looks like.

> I've asked five (5!) times to be taken off their list and added to a blacklist for candidates and I still get emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages.

This is like complaining to the person who called you about your vehicle warranty or any other spam auto-dialer. Recruiting is a numbers game so sending you an email with thousands of others requires no effort on their part.

Putting my # and email address on a blacklist in their CRM shouldn't be too difficult for a company with resources such as FB. If two-bit recruiting agencies can do it in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa then FB can do it.

Sorry, not changing my opinion here.

That depends whether the recruiters are in-house.

If the facts are as you said, that you've repeatedly told them to stop calling you, it may be worth talking to a TCPA Lawyer.

I'm not asking you to change your opinion. All I'm doing is explaining the rhyme and reason here. If you chose to continue getting mad at something so frivolous please carry on with your wasted efforts.

> If you work there, you're gross.

I think that's a touch harsh. What if you just make sandwiches in a canteen?

Then you’re probably a contractor who is being mistreated.

I think it would be interesting to start an underground movement of engineers taking their inflated salaries and then doing a deliberately bad job while working there. I can do just about any job badly-- this could be my calling!

I gave up telling them they were wasting their time, and now my spam filter takes care of FB headhunter spam for me, as it should.

FTR, I do think that's a bit unfair. Judging other peoples' circumstances is a perilous pursuit.

But I will say FB is parasitic on and dangerous to society and is run by amoral shitbags, I don't believe anyone with a sense of ethics or self-respect should work there.

How do you even end up in a situation where recruiters are banging down your door with such offers? I know developers who have reverse engineered applications, fixed unbelievable bugs deep an application stacks, written top tier code that make them the go to people in teams for all the tough problems and yet they barely get any call backs much less for companies like Facebook. They have to grind leetcode for 1 year just to get interviews at no name companies in the mid-west(despite willing to relocate anywhere). Its like there is this "in" group of developers and if you are "in" you can act like how you do and if you are not, then you are in starvation mode with all the other starving fish in the sea.

Likewise it just seems so selfish to talk like this during a pandemic situation where so many people (including people in tech) are out of a job.

Live in a city with Facebook offices. Work for a similar company.

Recruiters offer phone calls not jobs. You still have to grind to pass the interviews.

So the strategy is basically to get into the FAANG club once and then you are golden as long as you keep up your grinding?

GAFAM if it has to be an acronym. Other big software companies work too. Basically yes otherwise.

Yep - 100% this. Once you get a household name on your resume you're golden if you can do a simple whiteboard interview.

> They can’t hire people with good ideas anymore because as we know money isn’t a great motivator

This is not entirely true. I have seen excellent people go to Facebook because they gave out the highest offers. Now whether they get people with good ideas is something I don't know.

Those people won’t be excellent for long in a Dead Sea.

I've never seen this comparison before. Are you suggesting that Facebook is similar to an endorheic basin?

Hmm, interesting. I have always thought of it as a kettle lake. But you're right! There is a strong argument for endorheic basic.

They are referring to the Dead Sea effect: http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

I spent five years golden handcuffed at Facebook and hired a large number of brilliant, driven people there. Most of them are still there because of the obscenely large sums of money Facebook pays to keep them there. Note that Facebook does not do counteroffers, and instead makes sure to keep the best people financially motivated to stay each year.

What do those people work on?

Zstandard is pretty nice: https://github.com/facebook/zstd

Facebook has some top notch systems and infrastructure.

What exactly does that mean, "Facebook does not do counteroffers"?

So you name an amount and either take you or not?

To clarify, if you're employed at Facebook and get an offer from another company, Facebook won't attempt to counter that offer to keep you. The initial offer to get employed at Facebook is of course negotiable.

Probably for the better. People who have already gotten a competitive offer must be determined to leave.

Yes, it is genuinely a good policy. It results in happy employees not being penalized for not shopping around for offers.

Curious, why did you leave?

Since you are on the outside now, do you still agree with their mission and tactics or do you see them on a path towards 'user-engagement metrics over everything' ending in destruction.

I don't know if this generalizes across the company. They still have brilliant technical people, some of the best ML researchers, have open-sourced increbidly popular and influential frameworks like React and PyTorch. Just because their upper management or their business model might suck doesn't mean that they don't have great people working there.

> because as we know money isn’t a great motivator

HR industry would like you to believe that, but it's an intentional bastardization of the original research by Kahneman and Deaton (1), twisting their words to fit their cost cutting agenda. The original finding states that past a rather high threshold (~$75k), additional raise alone is an insufficient motivator. Below that threshold, money alone works just fine as a motivator. Above that threshold, pay hike still enhances other motivators.

In Bay Area, I agree that ethical concerns likely dwarf money. $120k/year in Europe would let them scrape the creme de la creme, despite near universal dislike among tech-crowd.

(1) https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/27/1011492107.abs...

75k a year number is brainwashing, being rich is better. 75k is poverty with a family in many parts of the USA

> They can’t hire people with good ideas anymore because as we know money isn’t a great motivator

I know tens of people from my past who currently work in Facebook. When I knew then, they were all decent people with long careers in the tech industry. Yet, they chose to work for FB.

A fresh grad son of my ex-Boss is starting his career with FB.

Unfortunately FB's brand is not as tainted, yet, as it should be or as some of us in the HN echo-chamber like to believe.

When their internal memo about "connecting people" was leaked to the public, some FB employees wanted to actively select for loyalty in their hiring process:

> Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company

> How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?

> Although we all subconsciously look for signal on integrity in interviews, should we consider whether this needs to be formalized in the interview process?

> This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo-le...

>> This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.

Oh the irony.

They fell victim to the common trap of "We have to do something, and this is something to do, therefore we have to do it"

I'm fascinated by the decision too. But I'm guessing it isn't driven by stupidity.

This campaign seems very unlikely it will change public opinion or make Apple change their position.

Perhaps the campaign helps to build a position in terms anti-trust legal proceedings? As the least vertically integrated of the big tech companies, it helps build a case that they are the victim, not the perpetrator - Apple is using its market power to shut them out.

But I don’t see them having a decent argument. Apple will (rightfully) say this gives their customers (who pay $$$ to get on their platform) a choice. They’ll also argue that “opt-in” is the right way to go for this kind of choice.

Facebook’s argument is “but it isn’t in our customer’s interests”, and they may add “if Apple adds such a feature, it should be opt-out”.

That first argument doesn’t have any value. Why would any third party have to accommodate Facebook’s advertising business? The second one is extremely weak, as ‘the world’ is moving towards, or already arrived at “opt-in is the only good choice”.

They also publicly stated that Apple’s opt-in doesn’t apply to Apple’s own adverts. _If_ that’s correct, they have a good point, but I think that’s a very, very big _if_.

FB signaling is not targeted at you or me, Grandma, or most of the rest of the public.

It is to show a credible commitment to Apple's other adversaries, in an attempt to rally enough power to take them down a peg and (more importantly) win some control over the Iphone platform.

Given the wording, I still don't see how this works. A more long term, indirect approach would probably work better.

If Facebook had a continuous, long term, PR campaign, where they reasonably established themselves as helping small businesses, and then they did this. I would get it.

But like this? In isolation, it feels more like a knee jerk reaction and not a thought out messaging campaign.

My guess is that the root cause is one of internal perception vs external perception. They see the threat and honestly believe they're in the right. That's how they rationalize it, but the rest of the world assumes more nefarious intent (which is also exaggerated, the truth is likely somewhere in the middle).

The small business stuff is just rationale for the rubes. It is a stalking-horse argument for their real interests.

And I'm not sure what unfair 'nefarious intent' people are assigning - FB have made it clear that one of their goals is reducing Apple's control over their own platform.

Apple recently has gotten lots of issues with antitrust lawsuits, especially in EU. Probably this kind of public campaign will likely draw more attentions from other iOS developers who have enough complaints but scared to fight against Apple. And even for Apple, FB (+Instagram and WhatsApp) is not something trivial to crush unlike Epic or Spotify. FB alone might be negotiable, but this can grow into significant headaches for Apple if it lets other Unicorn-level companies to form a coalition with FB or other tech giants.

The proliferation of spyware has become unbearable. You cannot anymore use any app or service - even the paid ones - without having to worry that any of your data is being collected. And no, reading through piles of TOS and privacy disclaimers is not gonna solve this.

Users must gain control back and opt-in must be the default.

Full Open Source and Libre software will be a solution, as it has always been.

Is there any other real solution, besides emotional rhetoric? I don't believe regulation will really help, they will just skirt the lines and have lots of oopses.

> Full Open Source and Libre Software will be a solution

I'm all in for FOSS but in the current state of the infrastructure that would just swap reading TOS to reading source. It just is not feasible for every single user. The alternative is crowd trust but that problem tends to be solved naturally by institutionalization, which brings other requirements such as organization and solving monetary problems.

What we need is a change in infrastructure. Why is it allowed that IP addresses are geolocated in the first place? Why do browsers share the name of your graphics adapter by default? Why is the user agent not abolished?

I can't imagine that even the less technical, typically less privacy concerned public, is going to have much sympathy for Facebook disliking Apple's move to put privacy controls in users hands. In fact considering the political bipartisan dislike for Facebook at the moment, I can't help but see this as outright counter productive.

A better PR move would have been to say "We are always seeking ways to put the reins of control withing users hands, and are happy to see that Apple has similar goals. At the same time we will educate users on the value of working with Facebook on the benefits heightened user experience when Facebook is able to generate custom content and tailored user experiences"

Lies and generalities sure, but at least it isn't shooting themselves in the foot.

This isn't the end of facebook. These privacy changes will affect all social networks and they all run a free membership model. It will certainly change their profitability but facebook is earning so much money there's a long way to go before this becomes an existential problem. If anything these new changes might eliminate some of facebook's competitors because they will have a much harder time to grow their user base without the additional revenue from spying on their users.

The article's thesis is that the free content model is dying, and FB needs to pivot to a paid one.

It may rather be that the content market is bifurcating, with "free" going toward the lower end mass market. Which FB seems perfectly positioned to serve.

I was a big supporter of Apple for a long time and welcomed privacy focused initiatives when they first started making noise a while back.

However since then I’ve become much more skeptical. Apple is no less evil or different; okay, I take that back, they are slightly better but I’m no longer a fanboy.

I don’t think the Apple of today, who carefully monitor what everybody does on their macs and make it difficult / annoying to bypass the Mac App Store, cares about privacy or the consumer as much as they lead us to believe. Steve Jobs cared a lot about privacy, from what I have read, but the current group, whilst highly intelligent and producing great innovative products like the M1, are very much driven by profit and not vision.

Examples include not providing basic accessories with their expensive iPhone products (seriously I spent 1,000 for an iPhone 12 Pro Max for my Girlfriend and there is no wall plug? Give me a break with their environment saving reasons, they could easily donate a lot more money if they really cared about the environment and not try to trick consumers that they are do-gooders).

The more nefarious example is how Apple is pushing paid apps and subscriptions so much on their App Store, since they take a cut. It’s a core part of their services strategy. I don’t see too much ethical differences between selling users privacy for ads and aggressively taking advantage of the average consumer and trying to lure them more and more into more paid subscriptions (many which they don’t need and also are overpriced, but since it’s a monthly charge it is harder to tell).

I am not comfortable with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon being so large and controlling the tech landscape.

I’ve used MacBooks for the past 10 years, my next computer will 100% be a Linux.

> I’ve used MacBooks for the past 10 years, my next computer will 100% be a Linux.

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

They are nowadays

It’s not, I quite like the Unix base of OSX. However there are many things where you need to tinker with the settings quite a bit to get apps to work well, that work out of the box on Linux.

I know Linux has enough / more problems than OSX, but I’m finally quite motivated to take a stance on this, it’s getting ridiculous on how much big tech want to control our machines.

If you mean installing Linux directly on my MacBook, sure that is possible — however I am happy with Catalina for now, so will just upgrade to the latest x86 Linux build in about 3 years. Unless M1 changes the computing world all together....

The issue is supporting companies in general instead of the actions they take. I think this is a great move by apple to educate people on the privacy they are sacrificing with apps. That doesn't mean I'm a fanboy. Being a fanboy seems like it's almost always a mistake as it will just lead to illogical support of decisions that harm you.

I switched to Linux last week. It's nice.

I don’t get the charger whining from people. If you add the price of the charger and the wired earphones to the price of the phone then with inflation it’s cheaper than the handsets were in 2018.

I’ve got 7 Apple chargers here as well. This is a completely rational decision which is transitional while we all move to USB-C slowly.

Your general point is right but it’s not the state of the company you need to look at but the direction they are travelling and Apple appears to be heading in the least wrong direction.

I agree. I got like 10 chargers at home and instead use a wireless charger.

I imagine the people most annoyed about this don't have any, or know that they needed to. (Because you're hogging them all. Way to go!)

I am not sure it's whining. Apple is cutting costs while pretending it's for a larger cause.

I might also have 7 chargers, but none of them are for USB-C - the type of the cable that they did include with the box. So I still have to buy a charging brick.

Well you won’t have to next time :)

You have 7 chargers and not a single lightning cable? Or a wireless charger?

> then with inflation it’s cheaper than the handsets were in 2018

Inflation has consistently outpaced increase in salaries, so it still costs more on real terms

> I’ve got 7 Apple chargers here as well

And yet there's a substantial market for third-party chargers, even the smallest convenience stores sell them.

From personal experience the majority of everyday folk have one or two chargers in their house, and as many cables. If they sell or giveaway an old phone then a charger has to go with it.

For many if not most people, an iPhone's raison d'etre is to connect to these ad driven services. It is annoying that Apple gets a pass because their business is merely selling shovels rather than mining gold.

What is apple getting a ‘pass’ from?

> I don’t see too much ethical differences between selling users privacy for ads and aggressively taking advantage of the average consumer and trying to lure them more and more into more paid subscriptions (many which they don’t need and also are overpriced, but since it’s a monthly charge it is harder to tell).

If you buy something, you're consciously making a transaction. You're handing money to someone in exchange for a good. In contrast, Facebook entices users to join their platform, and then subtly collects analytics about users through a variety of ways across the internet without any indication that they're there, save for some very subtle fine print.

I don't see how consciously exchanging money is even remotely close to ad-tracking networks. If anything, there should be at least the same level of friction for tracking as there is with a normal transaction -- which is what Apple is doing here.

Yes, Apple is totally motivated to push this, but in a capitalist society, what's your proposed alternative?

Privacy aligns with Apple’s revenue model (selling hardware) but not with Facebook’s (selling ads). This is the only reason you should have faith that Apple will work to protect your privacy, while Facebook will work to undermine it.

Everyone says that Apple’s business is selling hardware but that’s changing. Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud storage and their commission on app sales are all clear software incentives. Yes, they’re still dominated by hardware sales but it’s obvious they are interested in diversifying.

That might be true. But still those are all paid services, and not ad subsidized ones.

I don't believe this for a second. Apple's largest revenue growth has been in services, and they are sitting on a trove of data. They have a million bad incentives.

Honestly I can't believe we're even having this discussion. It's like Google all over again.

Apple says "trust us" but gives us no way to verify the trust. Trust without verification is a long-term recipe for disaster.

> and make it difficult / annoying to bypass the Mac App Store

I'm trying to avoid cherry picking, but this isn't my experience at all. I use a Mac for work and haven't really made any use of the app store. Nonetheless, I have all the apps I need and homebrew fills in the rest. Is there something I've unwittingly avoided?

No, there really isn't. There are apps that I've bought through the App Store, some of which I actually use at work, and I don't really see value in "avoiding" apps just because they're in the App Store. But most of what I use is outside it, and if an app is available both inside and outside -- as many are -- I usually get the direct sale one.

(While I shouldn't speak for the OP, I'm a little suspicious that this is the "Big Brother Apple is going to lock down macOS just like iOS" narrative popping up again.)

As a recent switcher to macOS I certainly have that leash-like feel.

First, app versions often differ between the Mac App Store and developer's own website. "Independent" versions tend to be a bit less restrictive, packing more functionality or features that Apple forbids for any reason. For instance, the App Store version of Elmedia player does not have a video/stream saving feature. Other apps like Telegram (specifically, the App Store versions) restrict the user from viewing the channels/communities which have been marked as spreading "pornographic"/"pirate" content. Needless to say, the app variants obtained from elsewhere pack all the features.

Second, I was surprised (well, not really) to learn about "notarization" in the latest versions of macOS, which essentially means signing the app by Apple. These days it's not just about scaring the user into thinking that unidentified apps are inherently evil (which the OS does a lot), it's also actively preventing the user from actually opening such apps. In Catalina the default dialog for opening an identified app features something like two buttons, offering to "Cancel" and "Move to Trash". So you have to either go to the Settings and override the security control or know that a control-click spawns the same window with an additional "Open" button being available.

At this point one starts thinking, how long will it take before those overrides and control-clicks get taken away for good.

Apple from today is just similar to the Apple from 30 years ago, those that only know OS X post Apple are figuring it out now that they aren't in deep need of cash any longer.

For what is worth, I that that Apple.

“...who carefully monitor what everybody does on their macs”

People keep making statements like this, but I have so far never seen anyone actually show any evidence for it.

What makes you think this is true?

I think it's mainly because of the kerfuffle about certificate revocation checks?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/mac-certificate-chec...

Well doesn’t that make it bullshit then?

I don’t see anything about the certificate kerfuffle that in any way justifies the statement.

Yes. Call me an Apple fanboy but criticisms that this was somehow nefarious data collection are baseless paranoia.

haha these companies like facebook, google are so shit. First they start monopoly and later say "We are fighting for small companies, people bla bla bla". Why not directly say we are greedy advertising company and we want all those data otherwise our unethical business will die. User should not know we are using their data to generate $60 for 6 months.

Any people who works on facebook should reconsider what damage they have done to world.

“Article continues after video.”

Isn't it a bit ironic that a magazine who’s page is PLASTERED by advertising and data collecting beacons is claiming the model is dead...

Has the concept of journalistic integrity gone by the way side? Do as I say, read these 10 things that you didn’t know about famous celebrity?

It’s in fashion to gang up on Facebook, it’s a lot harder to actually analyze the Ad market space, realize how we got here, and where the true dangers lie. But yea, that would take research... and well, journalistic integrity.

( newspapers didn’t adapt to the new media in the late 90s and they’ve been suffering ever since.. it’s sad.. but clamoring for the old days of TV and Papers domination of advertising is naïveté. Apple just wants to be the new network.. that’s all.)

To borrow a line from Churchill, "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning"

facebook removed the blue verified tick from apple official page on facebook.

the page has 13 million+ followers.

That's so petty it's actually hilarious.

lol so petty

> facebook removed the blue verified tick from apple official page on facebook.

How incredibly absurd and petty.

'Verified' ticks in general are so bizarrely mismanaged. See also Twitter removing the status of controversial political figures. I feel like they should be totally open access to anyone who can provide irrefutable proof of identity, rather than these odd status symbols.

No, this is fake news. The page was never verified in the first place.

https://www.soyacincau.com/2020/12/24/did-facebook-remove-ap...

Anyone who can successfully predict downfall of large publicly traded companies can work for a hedge fund and make tens of millions of dollars a year.

Anyone who cannot predict such events can write articles for a magazine claiming otherwise. At least it helps sell their speaking and consulting engagements.

Completely agree. That title is so stupid that I wish I could "killfile" that author from all my web news feeds.

this is wisdom

There are limits to what you can do with superior but imperfect knowledge though. E.g. everyone knows Tesla stock is overvalued - even Elon tweets about it. And yet it's not really feasible to profit off this knowledge.

Why is it not feasible to short Tesla?

because you don't have a good idea as to when they will stop being overvalued?

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Isn't that a market failure then? If the founder and CEO of the company says the company is over-valued, there should be someone in a position to capitalize on that information.

Not really a failure. It's important to realize that people are not necessarily always paying for the 'actual value of a company' (subjective itself) but for what other agents will be willing to pay for the stock. If that value is higher than the current price, they'll buy.

Sure, but then so is pretty much every aspect of the stock market, IMHO. It's a tool with all sorts of terrible flaws when it comes to capital allocation. A single company being overvalued without a safe way to bet against mass delusion of the public isn't that large of a flaw compared to the systematic over valuations and under valuations, IMHO.

This isn't to say that it's not without its uses, but we should be aware that it has huge problems even if we don't know of a way to fix them yet.

> Isn't that a market failure then?

By definition, every non-ideal behavior of real markets is a “market failure”.

Real markets, as opposed to Econ 101 idealized ones, are full of market failures, both due to structures that Econ 101-level analysis ignores about basic market structures and human irrationality.

Also, long and short positions aren't symmetric, because there is no non-margin way to enter a short position. This makes the ability of the market to stay irrational more likely to go bite you in a short position than a long one, ceteris paribus.

"markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"

You’d need to be a “long-term short” - which is difficult to pull-off.

Same reason it’s not been profitable to short them for the last 3 years.

Because it assumes a rational market. And the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

who is this a quote of? seems like common knowledge here.

I believe John Maynard Keynes

Often attributed to Keynes, though it looks like it was likely Gary Shilling:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

Thanks for the good refs!

I know a lot of people meme about the Reddit Wall Street Bets community, but if you want to see a stream of people losing money trying to guess TSLA’s downfall, that’s a good place to start.

There are also lots of examples there of people gambling on TSLA shooting to the moon and making a killing this year.

If you only predict that the stock is overvalued, it may indeed be difficult to exploit that information.

However, in this case, the author predicted the downfall of a huge company. If its business starts failing by any reasonable metric, its stock will fall very fast and very far.

You'd need a few prescient articles under your belt before the hedge fund would hire you, though.

It's also pretty naive reasoning. Author thinks a significant enough number of people are going to care? Facebook has survived- no, thrived despite multiple public scandals, some of which were far more substantive than complaining about Apple's privacy policy.

A few months ago, I would have completely agreed with you. But the number of facebook addicts that I know that have quit facebook recently, are starting to make me rethink my position on this. I know it's just anecdotal, but maybe it's also not.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/247614/number-of-monthly...

Maybe we are indeed in the beginning of a trend reversal, but we don't have enough data to support that as far as I know.

SOTP suggests FB investors at around $180-$200 could make out nicely even if they split Instagram and Whatsapp. I don’t think there’s a lot of synergy among those three core businesses. In fact, Instagram would be worth a lot more independently (just as Youtube would be worth more operating alone). This is to say not a lot of downside as people may expect from Political scrutiny forthcoming. My two cents.

Not a lot of synergy from the end user’s perspective, but the value of those platforms is the advertising network, which is a massive synergy for Facebook operating all three platforms and owning all three audiences. I don’t know how exactly a split would work but I see more downside than upside to having to recreate the ad network on each platform.

Given most phones are Android phones, wouldn't it only happen if Android takes the same approach, which it is highly unlikely to since that would impact Google's ad targeting?

It's not likely to be the end of Facebook. What's the alternative? WeChat? But it may make Facebook less profitable.

Facebook probably doesn't really need info from tracking users outside Facebook. They already have plenty of info about what people are doing while logged into Facebook.

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

another end of the world blah blah blah article. The truth is both are still doing extremely good and FB for sure will not end here. On top of this im extremely disappointed that Apple has the power to take these measures and regulate other companies within their Walled garden. What is US and World identities doing ? Why does it need to be another company with a Monopoly to regulate other ?

in this instance, what measure did Apple exactly take?

give users the option of opting out?

If that option was there in the very first place a significant portion of the marketing spend wouldn't have happened throughout the years.

Now that the market is well established cutting Facebook off is a good strategy for Apple as this will probably move a significant chunk of marketing budget their way.

Now Facebook's fate is collateral damage.

the option was there for quite a while now. it’s not new. now the developers of apps need to tell you the shady stuff they are doing.

Remember when Facebook came up with their own walled garden, and no one wanted it?

If there is a normal order in societies, it must be the fruit of an anterior crisis.

Things have to get ugly before they get better. Here’s to the greater good.

Not disputing this theory, but want to add: This, if true, is only the case because of our collective human short-sightedness, greed and stupidity.

Doesn't matter - even if facebook loses all its traffic tomorrow, it has a huge gold mine of data that it can sell or train AI on.

The article states that people will pay subscription fees to cooking sites and sports blogs. Not gonna happen.

Wow, now this was a painful article to read. The author spreading his opinion like fact when he has not a trounce of research or objectivity in the article.

I do not like Facebook, but if I had to choose between Facebook or Apple, I'll choose Facebook every time.

I especially dislike Apple for it's hypocritical behaviour, users need to be aware of companies tracking them, unless it's us...

always figured that government regulators would be the ones attacking the FAANGs (guess this is happening).

Never imagined them attacking each other.

Pot calling kettle black. All mobile os are just ad delivery platforms that the user never truly owns as they are completely sealed and locked down.

Yes please, kill Facebook.

Do you realize that Apple isn't that popular outside of US and Apple can't kill anything with its actions?

Must be why my foreign employees always want to visit the Apple store before returning to their home.

Because iPhones are cheaper in the US and can be resold for profit/gifted.

You're not wrong. HN crowd is known for having a majorly US centric view.

The country where a teen can get bullied if their messages show up green on iMessage. [1]

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150211/05455029985/green...

There are Apple stores in 25 countries, and engineering locations in 14 countries.

People use all Apple all over the world. The iPhone is massively popular in all wealthy countries and the MacBook dominates amongst developers in almost all of them.

It's about 80/20 iPhone/Android in North America, and in the rest of the world, it's the inverse.

Do you think a near-quarter of the market held by a single product line counts as 'isn't that popular'?

Apple is the biggest company in the world by a pretty significant margin[0]. The clout they wield is absolutely insane and they could kill many things if they were so inclined.

[0] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

Everyone that "declare war" on Apple either fades into obscurity soon after their 15 minutes of fame, or becomes Apple:

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/ki1rvt/samsung_began...

"Becoming Apple" in Facebook and Epic's case may mean their own app stores, and both of them are already sort of on their way there.

Epic Games appears to be still going strong, for better or for worse.

Too soon to tell.

Epic Games might be the exception that proves the rule.

Epic doesn't actually need Apple (they have a half-dozen much better ways to deliver their games, all of which better target + support their core revenue audience). Their Unreal Engine is popular with developers, but if they lost iOS device support and those mobile devs switched to Unity, most major games would still continue to use Unreal to target all the major platforms.

And similarly, Apple doesn't need Epic, their iOS consoles historically don't push any high end or involved gaming, so they don't cede any meaningful ground losing them. And Apple has a bajillion dollars, they could lose all game sale revenue / gaming IAP revenue tomorrow and barely even notice it.

---

Best case scenario: Epic breaks Apple's monopoly and gets anti-trust regulation enforced upon Apple (something that really should have happened a decade ago).

Worst case scenario: Epic + Unreal is banned from Apple devices. Some mobile devs have to transition to Unity. Folks have to use the PC/Switch/PS4/Xbox most people already own anyway, to play Fortnite + other Unreal titles.

No matter which happens, everyone's better off.

IMO, iOS/tvOS gaming has a bigger risk of stealing some of Nintendo's revenue stream, than it does hurting anything more intense.

Microsoft seems fine.

Not exactly the same situation, but didn't Steve Jobs threaten to kill Dropbox after they said no - i.e. note that Dropbox still exist?

Dropbox is struggling to survive and has resorted to adding "teams" features that no one really wants to live up to their valuation.

Dropbox IMO is a terrible organization. Vastly overpriced and made it very difficult for us to cancel.

Google, Android, netflix, Amazon, spotify, garmin, bose, sony, steam, dell, samsung, lenovo, all seem fine.

I hope they move to Colorado with Palantir and get the fuck out of our community.

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