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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

However this is not Apple products. This is other peoples' products. For example, other peoples' software. Following the "tech" company playbook, Apple is simply acting as a middleman. And in this case a 30% tax man.

Is the volume of crypto transactions rising. Coinbase announced something about increased volume back in September. Perhaps those sales and marketing people at Apple see an opportunity to profit as crypto investors lose their shirts.

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> However this is not Apple products.

The App Store is a product and it’s a bad product for developers and users when Apple is using their market position to take 30% of revenue.

Where can I purchase an App Store. Not sold separately.

Why would I want one, if I am not in control of it. I just want to run a program on a computer I bought.

Maybe one can argue a consumer will buy a computer in order to get the "App Store product", although it seems to me more like a product feature than a product itself. Personally, I would intentionally choose a computer without an App Store, where I can install whatever I want, and without reporting all the software I use to Apple.

After all, I know what software I want to install. As a NetBSD user I prefer to compile programs myself. The only "curation" I want is small source code size so I can read through the program before deciding whether to compile and test. Thus I have to do the "curation" myself. It cannot be delegated or outsourced. I do not need Apple to recommend software to me. Especially software they did not write. But who cares about me, if I am in a minority, because to the "tech" company proponents, only the majority matters. To the "tech" worker what is not popular is irrelevant. No surprise given the "tech" racket depends on selling adevertising services.

"Discovery" of unpopular software in an App Store is exceedingly difficult. The search capabilities are crude. The design appears to be display "Top 10" type lists and funnel computer owners toward popular programs, creating a lottery for whomever makes the "Top 10" and larger audiences for advertising.

So, you think you don't need curation but actually you do. There is some malware filtering that goes on, and some minimum (and I do mean minimum) quality control. There are content restrictions and such, that make the platform widely appealing. You might not want them, but the reason more and more and more apps are written for the platform is because of market power that comes from being content friendly. So the app you think doesn't need gatekeeping might not have ever even been written had it not been for this gatekeeping.

Kind of like saying, what has a cop ever done for me?

That said, yes, everything about it could be better. I very much detest app discovery in the app store, and it's almost as difficult via web or other means. At least in amazon you can filter out under 4-star products. And if you apply at least one category filter then you can also filter out marketplace sellers. The app store should have at a minimum some kind of stars filter.

There's no transparency or real studies if there's some effective malware filtering by forcing the app store model so at this point it's difficult to take it seriously.

> You might not want them, but the reason more and more and more apps are written for the platform is because of market power that comes from being content friendly

[Citations needed] again basically, there's only two platforms on mobile, it's not like developers can get the luxury to chose a platform.

> There's no transparency or real studies if there's some effective malware filtering by forcing the app store model so at this point it's difficult to take it seriously.

Maybe look at the Android situation: Malware is at least two orders of magnitude more prevalent, and it's mostly because you can type "free fortnite vbucks android" into the search bar, get on a YT video that links to a shady site, that shady site tells the user how to enable sideloading and install spyware apps masquerading as coin generators.

You don't need to go that far to get spyware, they are already available on the play store if you look enough

At this point iPhone isn't a product. It's control, manipulation, and extortion of the free market well beyond any notion of fair competition.

Apple won 51+% of American consumers. Now it taxes all of the computing and commerce workloads they engage in.

Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade. They've buttoned up every single industry and put them all under thumb.

Apple is taxing the internet, basically. (And Google's scary and hidden side loading isn't much better.)

> At this point iPhone isn't a product.

What? This is a weird statement. iPhone is 100% a product. There are many alternatives.

> Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade.

This is not the current scenario. Using your example, it would be like if Tesla owned a building, a coffee shipping company, and coffee making equipment and Starbucks sold coffee using Tesla resources. In this example, it would be expected for Tesla to charge Starbucks a premium for this full service coffee company being white labeled by Starbucks.

>Apple is taxing the internet, basically.

No. Apple is charging a fee to list products for sale on their store. Similar to every other store in existence.

The iPhone isn't a product. The Apple ecosystem is. I purchased it to ensure (A) nobody can take my phone, punch in my passcode and Apple ID and install malware that hides itself or otherwise flash the software to look like iOS but with malware on top, and (B) when I use native apps, the chance of having malware distributed to me there is almost 0.

Pegasus says hi.

Apple IS a product and the world isn't America. There is not a monopoly of Apple products all over the world. The people and specially in America can vote with their money and buy an Android if you disagree with Apple. Apple is not taxing the Internet when you have other options.

> And in this case a 30% tax man.

Do you mean that in a good way or a bad way? Taxes pay for roads, bridges, military and so on. Healthcare, in most of the developed world.

Taxation without representation. Those paying the tax have generally no control over how Apple spends the corresponding revenue.

With respect to those in the US who pay the "30% tax", most of Apple's income is kept offshore so Apple pays minimal if any taxes on it. Compared this to the majority of people in the US who buy Apple computers who keep their income in the US and do pay significant US taxes on it.

> Those paying the tax have generally no control over how Apple spends the corresponding revenue.

Sure you do. The consumer has a voice. If AirPods Pro 2 sucked, you vote by not purchasing them, and if enough other people do the same they'll can Airpods Pro 2 and create a third version in hopes it's good enough to "win back" your vote/money. This is the basis of free market capitalism and allows Apple to make a "product" (the Apple ecosystem) that people don't have to buy into, but they do because of the R&D Apple has invested into their product for over a decade.

This is why there’s no longer a HomePod, but there are HomePod minis.

If Apple is collecting a "30% tax" and, without any input from the "taxpayer", they choose to spend the tax revenue on producing rechargeable Bluetooth earbuds, how was the taxpayer given a vote on the decision to spend the tax revenue on producing rechargeable Bluetooth earbuds (versus something else). By the time they go to market with the overpriced earbuds, the money has already been spent. More "planned obsolescence" electronics waste in the landfills.

Going back to the original comment to which I responded, where the commenter compared Apple's "30% tax" to government-levied taxes for public services, this is like giving residents a vote on a new public services project after only it has been completed. At that point, the money has been spent. It's too late to for voters stop the government from spending their money on the project.

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