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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech.

Last fall, Google executives met to discuss how to reduce the company’s reliance on Apple’s Safari browser and how best to use a new law in Europe to undermine the iPhone maker...

Google, which the law will force to allow more competition in search, explored ways to lobby E.U. regulators to crack open Apple’s tightly controlled software ecosystem so Google could siphon users from Safari and Spotlight...

Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water in these skirmishes advocating a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose, in service of enabling the deepening of Google's moat in collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand.

Stepping back...

I believe engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy. I believe the hard work for achieving that ease makes users happy and engineers wealthy.

Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.

View on HN

> a forced dismantling of Apple's vertical integration consumers continue to deliberately choose

"deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil.

> Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.

Is the sweat of the literal biggest company in the world by market cap more important than the sweat of the users paying thousands of dollars for devices they can't control? These guys don't need protection of their vertical integration, they are not selling hardware at a loss.

I don't like Google nor Apple, so I'm not picking between them, I'm picking the users side. What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone. We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.

> .. everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.

The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question (im assuming no), and if its acceptable to force them to do something against their wishes for something they own then why don't we just force them to hand over billions of dollars directly to users as well (both forms of theft to me.)

> The question here for me is does this 'everyone' include the entity that made, invested & owns the device in question

Yes. Apple heavily benefits from market standardization and interoperability: from transportation, to currency, to electricity, to the web. That standardization prevents other companies from heavily abusing Apple in ways that would probably have prevented the company from ever rising to the prominence it is today. Apple the company benefited from antitrust when it was younger, particularly antitrust around Microsoft. Without that market interference, it is not clear that Apple would have survived long enough to launch an iPhone in the first place.

Now that Apple is as powerful as it is today, in a few areas it would like to avoid interoperability and it would like the ability to lock-down the market and to lock down devices that consumers own -- extracting additional value from those consumers against their will after the device has already been purchased by restricting the user's freedom to control their own devices.

But what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It's enormously hypocritical for a company that was historically an underdog that benefited dramatically from interoperability between computing ecosystems to now claim that no one else should get the same benefits.

I think the Microsoft judgement was opening up their APIs for other companies to make apps. If that's all you're comparing than that's a tough argument as that has little to do with the hardware being tied to an OS.

And to be clear, I'm not pro-Apple on not being able to install another OS. I think if there is a law it should be about EVERY device. Nintendo Switch, tractors, phones, etc. Just the environmental benefits would be big and always getting bigger.

The antitrust fights against Microsoft I think were a big reason why IE and Word ended up coming to MacOS. Apple also benefited from being able to reverse-engineer Word's format without facing legal trouble. And I think there were a lot of knock-on effects from that; even if we just look at the IE bundling would the web have looked the same if that ecosystem had never changed? Remember that iOS started out primarily supporting web apps; a closed down web ecosystem would have fundamentally changed the device.

Is that the same as forcing a company to open up hardware access? We can argue that, and I sort of see where you're coming from, but... I think my bigger point is:

> as that has little to do with the hardware being tied to an OS.

I feel like this is a very narrow interpretation of antitrust. Microsoft was prevented from abusing a market power that could have prevented other competitors from gaining a foothold in the market. Apple directly benefited from the government and regulators stepping in and saying "we don't think a company should be able to unduly block competition."

It feels a little hand-wavy if someone wants to make the argument that it's all different just because Apple now has a different mechanism for locking down the market. The problem was locking down the market, and that's still the problem. And what we're really asking is "should the government be able to stop a company from making the market uncompetitive?"

Sure, someone could make the argument that allowing a custom OS on a phone is technically different from government intervention standardizing electrical outlets so the iPhone can charge, but they're both regulations that serve basically the exact same purpose that are coming from the exact same authority. If Apple wants to claim that opening up the hardware would be a step too far, I'd want to see an argument from them about what is practically different about that regulation that makes it a step too far. We regulated device compatibility for phone networks and that led to an explosion of innovation that shaped the modern Internet.

Not all regulations are good. There should be limits on what the government can do. But I think the onus is on companies like Apple who have benefited from the government saying, "we have a vested interest in making the market competitive" to explain not just why the regulations being proposed are technically different, but to also explain why it matters that we're talking about opening hardware and not just software and why that regulation should be treated differently.

> I think if there is a law it should be about EVERY device. Nintendo Switch, tractors, phones, etc. Just the environmental benefits would be big and always getting bigger.

Completely agreed.

> The antitrust fights against Microsoft I think were a big reason why IE and Word ended up coming to MacOS.

Word was on Mac in 1985, Windows in 1989. There was an earlier version of Word for DOS.

Excel was on Mac first in 1985, and on Windows in 1987.

This is technically true (the best kind of true), but fails to mention that there was both a huge gap between Office on the Mac between 4.2 and 98 (coincidentally the version that came out in 1998 right around the antitrust case), and more importantly, ignores the fact that Microsoft literally is on record threatening to use Office to kill Mac, and negotiations around Office were literally presented as evidence during the antritust case against Microsoft: https://www.macworld.com/article/184614/macoffice.html

> Later, the U.S. Department of Justice included the bundling of Internet Explorer among the charges it brought against Microsoft in its antitrust case. "Microsoft, by threatening to cease development of its Office for Macintosh productivity suite, coerced Apple into making Internet Explorer the default browser on all Macintosh operating systems and to disadvantage competing browsers," the federal agency charged in 1998.

It's not really debatable whether an unchecked Microsoft monopoly would have affected Office on the Mac or whether it would have affected the trajectory of Apple's ecosystem as a whole -- it was straight-up part of the antitrust case against Microsoft. Delaying and degrading Office releases on Mac was the active policy of Microsoft by the late 1990s, both because it gave Microsoft power over Apple during business negotiations and because it allowed Microsoft to simultaneously hold off competing office-suite products while pulling more users away from Mac towards Windows, which had more up-to-date and less buggy versions of Office and IE.

---

And of course, notably, this is an example of antitrust being relevant to a company choosing not to provide a service. It's not merely that Microsoft went out of its way to block Apple's access, Microsoft was threatening to withhold development on Apple-compatible products. So let's not pretend that asking a company to go out of its way to do something can't be part of antitrust or that companies have an unimpeachable moral right to refuse to expend developer resources or adapt their business models when their business models are anticompetitive. Apple certainly wasn't arguing that it was "theft" in 1998 when the government was pointing out that Microsoft withholding active support could be an anticompetitive action.

How can your arguments not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight or to force McDonalds to serve Pepsi and not only Coke? These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple?

> These are also giant businesses who "benefitted from electricity", so they owe you big time, right? Or just Apple?

If you mean, are businesses other than Apple subject to antitrust law, the answer is yes, they obviously are. That's not really a gotcha, that's just how the US/EU markets have always worked.

> not be used to also force airlines to make your favourite pickle sandwich on every flight

Whether or not an airline serves pickles is not an antitrust concern. There's this idea people bring up where if the market is regulated in any way at all, then suddenly all bets are off and nobody has any freedom. But it's just plain silly, it's a ridiculous way to think about regulation.

It's like saying, "Oh, you support laws? Cops should be able to pull you over for speeding? So what, they should also be able to come into a restaurant, steal your food, and then slap you?" No, of course not, because those are different things and our society is capable of looking at different actions and judging them differently depending on context. Heck, you want to get wild -- we are even capable as a society of deciding that individual regulations are good or bad on a case-by-case basis based on their likely effects and side-effects.

So saying "the government has the authority to interfere with business practices when businesses are harming the entire market" is not carte-blanch permission for the government to do literally anything it wants. It's a specific category of regulation, one that is well-established within US and EU law.

But yes, if an airline was engaged in anticompetitive activity we would as a country be justified in regulating it. In fact, airlines are regulated today. It's not theoretical, we force airlines to follow rules to prevent excessive customer abuse. We force airlines to follow safety regulations. And yes, part of the reason why we can force them to do that is that airlines are a part of a regulated market where they benefit from regulations, and as willing participants in that market who have benefited from that market, they can't just randomly decide, "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."

I haven't seen any evidence of anticompetitive activity on Apple's part. Not mass producing products and services to the exact and exquisite taste of each hacker news poster is not anticompetitive activity, just like an airline not serving your favourite pickle sandwich is not anticompetitive activity. Ford will make their cars compatible with Ford engines only, and if you want to put another engine inside your truck you'll have to do it yourself. Just as with Apple hardware. There's nobody stopping you.

Then of course the law and justice system are able to and will do whatever they want, in a completely arbitrary fashion as they usually do. That's reality. If they want to go after Apple they will.

The reality is also that it seems the general public and hackers take all innovation, products and services for granted. Something that just magically pops up to be taken advantage of by forcing other people to bend to your will, using the government as a club to hammer them with. Sure, if there's abuse. But not making a Linux-compatible iPhone is not abuse, no matter how hurt hackers feel. Why not focus on actual abuse instead, of which there is a lot?

> "no, I'm not part of the market now when you want to regulate me, I've decided that I'm suddenly now a completely independent entity that's divorced from the rest of the economy."

That is what has always happened and is called brain-drain. People and companies move to places that reward entrepreneurship instead of exploiting it.

> I haven't seen any evidence of anticompetitive activity on Apple's part.

I guess agree to disagree? Apple has a massive effect on the computing market, particularly around smartphones. We're currently legislating a Google antritust case in the US (which I hope Google loses) that alleges having default settings on an iPhone was worth billions of dollars to Google to help cement their place in the market.

But sure, you can disagree with that if you want. Lots of people do. Just don't pretend that regulation is inherently some slippery slope, argue against the specific regulation that you don't like.

> Ford will make their cars compatible with Ford engines only, and if you want to put another engine inside your truck you'll have to do it yourself. Just as with Apple hardware. There's nobody stopping you.

Not a great example, it would honestly take me a minute or two to think of a bigger industry off the top of my head where standardization and cross-device compatibility is more regulated than the auto industry. And it's been hecking fantastic; it is extremely good that the auto-industry uses mostly compatible parts and that it's forced to allow for 3rd-party repair and aftermarket customization and swapping of parts.

I would kill to have regulations for compatibility and 3rd-party support in the computing industry that were as strict as automotive regulations. Imagine it being illegal for Apple not to make diagnostic information available to all 3rd-party repair shops using the same physical port on the phone and using the same standardized communication format to query diagnostics that every other OS and phone uses. By all means, let's copy the auto industry, that is a great idea :)

> The reality is also that it seems the general public and hackers take all innovation, products and services for granted.

I would argue that if you look at the history of computing, increased competition between vendors and Open access to platforms between vendors has historically strongly coincided with innovation and better products for consumers. But... again, you can disagree with that if you want.

> People and companies move to places that reward entrepreneurship instead of exploiting it.

They're welcome to do so. Look, I'm not trying to force anyone to be part of a market; if Apple doesn't want to sell in the EU or US, there are very few companies in the world who have more capital and resources at their disposal to help them move markets. It's not like they're a mom-and-pop shop that can't afford to move and that are trapped under regulations, they are one of the biggest computing companies in the world and they have the resources to go elsewhere if they don't like the arrangements.

> entity that made, invested & owns the device in question

They made have made and investors in the device, but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me.

It’s absolutely ludicrous that anyone can describe their relationship to a device as “ownership” after the sale. We’ve given up so much as consumers. We’re in such an abusive relationship that we can’t even _see_ what a normal and healthy consumer relationship with these companies would actually look like.

> but they sure as shit don’t own it once they sell it to me.

Are you really sure about that? Apple can, at any time, and without any permission from you, remotely access your device and make changes including :

  reverting settings you've intentionally configured
  Adding software
  Removing software
  Changing the way already installed software works
  Disable features you're using
  Enable features you don't want 
  View/modify/delete "your" files 
  Restrict your access to access certain files/features/software 
  Brick your entire device

In what way really is the cell phone in your pocket "yours"? Your ability to use a cell phone you paid for is entirely dependent a company granting you permission and you are totally powerless to prevent them from revoking that permission if they wanted to.

"Your" device is already filled with encrypted storage and software you can't access but others can, along with chips from companies like Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc. that you cannot access, modify, or control but which can be remotely accessed to execute code on "your" device or transmit data collected from "your device" without your knowledge or consent

It really doesn't matter if your phone is apple or android. Under no sane definition of "ownership" do you own your cell phone. You are, at best, a low privileged user of someone else's system. It doesn't matter how benevolent the true owners of "your" cell phone are. It doesn't matter if they've never cut you off from your device entirely, or if every update they've ever silently installed has been something you approved of after the fact. It doesn't matter if they never do anything you object to with their device. It's still their device. They allow you to use it after you paid for it because it's profitable for them that you do use it and for no other reason.

Sure, your cell phone manufacture can't come into your home and take the brick of plastic metal and glass you paid for away from you, but it doesn't matter because they don't have to do that. They can take all of it's functionality away from you without ever physically touching it and if they ever do it'll be left useless to you for anything other than scrap or parts.

That’s kinda my point. That’s the abusive relationship.

I am the legal owner of the device, however. That part is still true. If you ask any Court in the United States who is the owner of the device, they will tell you that I am the owner and that Apple is not.

We vote with our dollars. We can buy devices that are open if it's important. Not sure how it's theft if we opted in.

Please consider this if you value a device that is yours https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

Or we vote with the government, and this is what they're doing.

> owns the device in question

Users owns the device. Why would you think Apple does? And Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to. Why are users forbidden from programming html rendering?

> Users owns the device... Apple forbids users from using devices that the user owns in ways that the user wants to.

If apple is able to prevent users from doing things they want to on a device, that device belongs to apple and not to the users.

Are you talking about ownership from:

- a moral perspective

- a legal perspective

- a "might makes right" perspective

Because all of those are different things. People are not saying that they practically own an iPhone in the sense that they control it; they are saying that they are the moral and/or legal owners of an iPhone and it's messed up that Apple is still allowed to exercise a "might makes right" kind of ownership over a device that the user purchased, essentially overriding and stealing ownership back from the user.

Be cautious about talking past each other in these situations. Apple's exertion of control is the thing people are complaining about here, and that exertion of control is not a legal or moral doctrine that dictates whether Apple should have that control.

If I get sued for stealing someone's car, and I tell the judge, "but it's not his car, it's mine. Look, I have it and I have the keys and he doesn't and I can drive it and he can't, so by definition it belongs to me", well... that's not an argument that's going to get me very far legally with that judge even though technically, sure, that is a definition of ownership. I don't think if Apple ever gets sued for antitrust the lawyers are going to be arguing, "but the consumer doesn't own their iPhone because we can remotely brick it, so by definition we own it." Again, not wrong, that is technically a definition of ownership. But it's just not what people here are talking about.

> something they own

That's just the thing. The whole idea that they should be able to own the iPhone is nonsense. They shouldn't be able to own the hardware after they sold it to you.

> What I'd like is to be able to put a different OS on my phone.... if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it and everyone would benefit directly and indirectly.

There are plenty of Android phones available for that. The OS choices are technically interesting, but not suitable for anyone but the most dedicated techie. I probably wouldn't call the situation "proliferating" either. At least not on a level where everyday people would see the benefit.

But in any event, developing a well-functioning phone OS take billions of dollars, especially when it comes to regulatory things like radio use. And even more especially when it comes to phone companies certifying the phone for use.

Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that.

> Opening the iPhone wouldn't make any difference there, with things on the Android side as strong evidence of that.

I'd say that projects like Ahahi Linux are evidence of the contrary.

The hardware standardization that an open iPhone would bring to the table would be fertile ground for OSS.

Android is a clusterfuck of abandoned and shitty drivers and hardware that no one cares to reverse engineer due to fragmentation and fast obsolescence. It's the Internet Explorer 6 of mobile hardware and software, it's misery.

> "deliberately choose" is too strong when you are picking the lesser evil.

Lesser evil of what? There are plenty of Android phones/tablets, and there are _many_ flavors of Android. There are _so_ many Linux/Windows laptops.

People choose Apple both because it's a good experience, and because the alternatives suck. The answer to the problem is _not_ to make Apple's products worse

People installing what they like on their devices doesn’t change how your device works

No amount of repetition is going to convince such people. Their entire argument is predicated on an absolutely erroneous belief that sideloading or user modifications will somehow ruin the experience of people who don’t wish to modify their phone knowing fully well that more setting for users won’t diminish the experience for other users. They’re literally playing stupid to defend a corporation and its practices.

You're welcome to share your thoughts, but please don't just assume what others are thinking.

I don't have a strong opinion about sideloading applications.

What I'm more concerned about is Apple being forced to allow non-WebKit browsers in the App Store.

Apple requiring the use of WebKit on iOS is the only thing stopping Chrome from having a complete monopoly, aside from Firefox with its 5% marketshare.

I am equally terrified of Chrome's dominance in the browser market.

I don't agree that forcing WebKit on iOS is the solution, however. The law should seek to break Chrome's monopoly, not enforce another.

Interesting take. I’ve de-giogled my life so I didn’t think about chrome. Fair enough

> We've seen what happened with Asahi Linux and the M Macs, if the iPhone were not locked down we would have a proliferating open source OS community around it

Yes!! I want this so much.

>Apple should be allowed to benefit from the sweat they invested and sell a mobile console appliance, while others should be allowed to make build-your-own mobile compute. Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.

Comments like me honestly scare me. If windows was released today, you'd only be allowed to install windows apps through the approved store, and some of you will even defend that.

And the Windows app market might actually be profitable rather than a mess of Electron apps. And maybe PC games wouldn’t all come with rootkits to prevent you from using your device.

So your argument is that it's better for your device to prevent you from using it out of the box rather than games which you fairly easily can opt out of by just not installing them?

> some of you will even defend that

Yeah. Always makes me sad to watch people come to Hacker News and defend the dismantling of everything hacking ever stood for.

You can always buy the device that allows hacking. No one is putting a gun to your head to by an Apple product.

If people want to buy a non-hackable Apple product that Apple tightly controls, that’s their business.

It doesn’t affect you. You should mind your own business.

I don't want to buy other devices. I want to buy Apple devices. I think they're just better phones in every way. I should have every right to buy an Apple device and run whatever software I want on it. I shouldn't be forced to use their software and I certainly shouldn't have less choices just because they want to "own" their "platform". These "all or nothing, take it or leave it" propositions are hostile to consumers and should be resisted at all costs. I should be able to get an iPhone without iOS.

I sure as hell won't "mind my business" while my freedoms are being denied by rent seeking corporations. If it was up to me, that'd be illegal. Hopefully the EU will put an end to the notion that they can "own" markets. Don't know what spirit possessed them to do it but I ain't gonna argue with a good thing.

Well I don’t want people forcing to Apple to change things when things are working just fine.

Currently opening up the browser to others just means Apple will lose control over that part of the UX as Chrome will eventually take over giving Google to have full control of the future of the web.

Now you will tell me, “We have Firefox!”. I use Firefox too on PC … tell me how that’s working out market-share wise.

I share the same concern. Browser monocultures should absolutely be prevented.

Keeping Apple platforms closed is not the answer though. The answer is to separate Chrome from Google.

Read your comment again and reflect on how you and others have reached total entitlement mentality. Everybody has to bend over backwards to accommodate you, otherwise "your freedoms are being denied" or it's "an abusive relationship" as another hacker wrote here in the thread. There are real people with real problems in this world. Not being able to install Linux on an iPhone is not a real problem. Either purchase products that suit your use or make products that suit your use, it seems beyond being spoiled to demand that somebody else mass produces a product to suit exactly your individual preferences down to the most minute detail.

> I shouldn't be forced to use their software

Nobody has ever tried to force you or other hackers to use any software.

> I should have every right to buy an Apple device and run whatever software I want on it.

You can do that if you have the know-how how to take complete control of the device by soldering and making your own microchips and software. Nobody can stop you from opening your iPhone and doing what you want with it.

> Comments like me honestly scare me. If windows was released today, you'd only be allowed to install windows apps through the approved store, and some of you will even defend that.

If people want a close platform and all that comes with it, it’s their business.

As long as there exist viable open platforms for those who want an alternative, I don’t see the problem.

This is a false dichotomy: we should be aggressively dismantling both of these companies for having distortional market power.

Powerful technology corporations are good for American hard and soft power. Also, they can create crucial technology. OpenAI would be nowhere without the transformer.

That's not great for us 95% of people who don't live in the US.

It's also not clear if it's good for most of us in the U.S. so yeah I get you

Monopolies are never good for users, and for employees.

There are good only for corporations and CEOs.

> Curious about HN's stance on carrying Google's water

Well if you search for things like "Google anti-trust docs"[1] you can see HN is ostensibly less interested than the rest of the media in Google's lawyer's scorched-earth blockade of public access to the trial documents and testimony. A lot of the actual material benefits that Google extracted from its anti-competitive schemes have been redacted or explained in closed-door testimony. Curious readers show know that stories like the OP are ones that Google's lawyers want you to focus on rather than what's not being shown. As bad as OP looks, it must be seen in the context of Google hiding other information for the public.

e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

iOS is not a feasible long-term solution to browser monoculture. It's just not. And the (heavy quotes) "equilibrium" between Chrome and Safari is not really want we want, we don't want 2 giant corporate browsers, we want diversity.

Google is currently involved in a potentially historic antitrust lawsuit in the United States over its search engine dominance. Maybe after that's done we should look at Chrome under the same lens. You don't have to pick a winner and loser and decide whether you're going to carry Apple's water or Google's water. You can just break them both up and force both of the companies to stop doing anticompetitive crap.

It's so dystopian to look at the current browser duopoly and to say, "well, which of these two companies do I want to rule over me, I have to pick one of them." We are capable of better.

> engineering should pay the hard price to make user use easy, and privacy easy

Last time I read Apple's privacy statement, which was about a year ago, it said essentially the same thing Google's does. Which is that both companies collect all of your data and use it internally as much as they want including for, among other things, advertising. The reason Apple has a perceived advantage in privacy (other than the fact that they've marketed it heavily) is that most consumers don't see them as an advertising company whereas Google clearly is. But they do have an advertising business, and one would expect it to get larger as they enter the search space.

Apple collects an immense amount of data about its users, including broad categories of data on very private things like health, payments, location, and broad categories like "fraud prevention."

If you're concerned about companies "collecting and profiling their (your) behavioral data exhaust in a way consumers don't understand," then I'm not sure it makes sense to buy Apple products, since they are very tight lipped with what they do with the enormous amounts of behavioral data exhaust they collect.

If even Alphabet cannot get a toehold on Apple devices, then other competitions have no chance.

In this case, I strongly favour opening the IPhone. Not because I care about Google, but because I care about completion at large.

25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE. They never stopped you from installing anything else. I don't understand why the same rule doesn't apply to Apple.

The idea of "opening" iOS so that we can welcome a Google Chrome monopoly just doesn't sit right with me.

This.

Microsoft was a monopoly because it had 97% of the desktop market. Their anticompetitive behavior is too long to list but include not being able to remove IE, they bundled Windows Media Player, wouldn't make office for competing products until the second coming of Steve Jobs, they tried to make their own version of Java, ...

This all sounds like the same stuff apple does with ios

> 25 years ago we said Microsoft was a monopoly just for including IE.

We said Microsoft was abusing their monopoly because they used criminal blackmail against hardware sellers, threatening to cease business with sellers if they tried to sell any computers with competing operating systems or without operating systems.

> Put another way, there's room for an iPad Pro 13 and a Frame.work Laptop 13. None of these should be forced to break their model to accommodate one of the others'.

Wasn't this the dream of MSFT Windows?

I have no problem with "carrying Google's water" in this case. They have as much right to computing freedom as we do. They should totally get to enjoy that freedom on Apple devices. As should we.

This is completely independent from Google's surveillance capitalism problem. We should deal with that separately by turning personal information into massive liability. Society should make it so it costs them literal truckloads of money to know even a single bit of information about any human being. They should be scrambling to forget all about us the second we're done transacting with them.

> sell a mobile console appliance

Nope. I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all. Computers should always be real computers at all times. This "appliance" nonsense is everything that is wrong with computing today. Infinite potential, wasted.

> They have as much right to computing freedom as we do.

Except they tirelessly work on taking computing freedom away from you.

You sure about that? Google's been one of the better companies when it comes to free and open source work. Their phones are significantly more free than their competition. It's ironic, they sell the easiest phones to install custom operating systems on. They even put in work into open firmware for their chromebook laptops. It's certainly something I've come to appreciate about them, despite their surveillance capitalism.

I switched away from Android in part because I wanted a phone that was just an appliance that always worked. I enjoyed fiddling with alternative ROMs and such but I eventually realized that, as a tinkerer, the only way to make sure my phone always worked when I needed it was to pick a device I couldn’t root and tinker with. I think the market is big enough for both models and we’re all worse off if the users that want the Apple experience are unable to pick it.

Just because you can root and tinker with something doesn't mean you have to. Millions of people use Android phones without ever having touched a third party rom (or even have the knowledge that they exist).

Additionally, Apple allowing a user to install a browser with a rendering engine other than webkit does not preclude a completely different user from experiencing the "Apple experience". The default experience will be the Apple experience.

I really don't understand this common sentiment that more freedom for a user to use a device in the manner in which they want to somehow takes away the freedom of others.

I know myself well enough to know that I need a phone that prevents me from tinkering if I want a device that works reliably.

These days Android is just a worse iOS anyway. All the freedom we used to have was wiped out by hardware remote attestation. If you tinker with anything, your phone will fail attestation and you'll be refused service everywhere. Might as well buy into the better kept garden if that's how it's going to be.

I have exactly two reasons to still prefer Android: Termux and GrapheneOS. Who knows what Google's going to break next though? There's already hints that the Linux system calls used by Termux will be sandboxed away someday. If that happens, there's no reason for me to use Android anymore.

Stuff like remote attestation should be illegal. They should be required by law to interoperate with you no matter what software you choose to run.

> I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all. Computers should always be real computers at all times. This "appliance" nonsense is everything that is wrong with computing today. Infinite potential, wasted.

This is great! This is the actual argument, so the clarity is wonderful.

If your starting point is to argue that NO manufacturer can be permitted to make a handheld mobile appliance (e.g., to phones what Switch or the PlayStation Portable [PSP] are to consoles) as a market alternative to mobile general computing devices, then, 100% agree that means there's no place for iPhone or iPad.

But then this seems weird, because these days everything has a computer in it, digital machinery to go along with mechanical machinery, and it's not clear why we get mad at Apple about "right to tinker" (that's not a real thing even though competitors attack competitors by gaslighting about it) without getting mad at all of these things.

It's not clear to me nobody should be allowed to fully integrate software and hardware (which are "just" different amounts of machinery or logic permanence embedded in one user experience), whether they allow "apps" as pluggable cartridges or not.

To borrow a non-computing utility tool metaphor: I consider the iPhone like a Leatherman™ tool. The maker works with people like me to decide an ideal mix of tools a Leatherman™ should be, perhaps offer me a few different tool mixes or sizes. I choose a known-good configuration I want, then I don't expect or need to be able to plug random third party accessories to the Leatherman™.

I find it anti computing freedom (as well as anti-libertarian and anti-capitalist) to forbid Makers™ from using their computing freedom to offer the marketplace an appliance that can take pictures or make phone calls or plug in apps. The computer form lets you invent new configurations (like a box of Legos turned into a model), then the appliance form lets others use it (like 3D printing the model). That should be OK.

So we disagree on the real argument, and that's fair.

I have a question though, what does this mean:

> Infinite potential, wasted.

I find dedicated gaming PCs far more wasteful of time and materials than consoles: wasteful of materials to have a predictable gaming experience, wasteful of time between wanting to be able to play a game and playing them, wasteful of time on an ongoing basis maintaining the ability to play a game.

(I say this as a person who made a living building and selling "beige box" computers in college, and who values understanding how to build a computer from parts.)

I'd argue that for casual gaming, consoles -- which also use fewer non-renewable materials than a PC sufficiently powered for equivalent game performance -- save far more time and materials "per gaming-hour" than they waste.

Yes, some of us have to learn to build tomorrow's consoles, but most just want to play a game. As in my opening remark, I believe our job as engineers is to learn, build, and deliver the "capability" to game, tailored to and fit for purpose.

But "infinite potential" is a lot of potential to be wasting -- what potential is unable to be met if allowing Apple to offer an appliance alongside others offering general devices?

> This is the actual argument, so the clarity is wonderful.

Thanks, that matters a lot to me. I really make an effort to be clear about what I think.

> If your starting point is to argue that NO manufacturer can be permitted to make a handheld mobile appliance (e.g., to phones what Switch or the PlayStation Portable [PSP] are to consoles)

I have no problem with the devices themselves. I have a problem with not being able to run my own software on them.

It was such a problem for me I installed custom firmware on my PSP. Even had my own pandora battery back then. Hell I hunted down and bought a very specific PSP model with a very specific motherboard revision so I had maximum control. Over a decade ago I installed rockbox on my 80 GB iPod so I could have FLAC support.

> these days everything has a computer in it

All the more reason to run our own software on them. We should always have the power to do that. Anyone who doesn't care can just use the manufacturer software.

> But "infinite potential" is a lot of potential to be wasting -- what potential is unable to be met if allowing Apple to offer an appliance alongside others offering general devices?

The potential to do literally anything you want. As opposed of course to the limited set of things the true owners of the platform merely allow you to do.

Thanks to apps like Termux which turn consumer hardware into real computers, I'm able to write software on my phone. I contributed to free and open source software from my phone. I developed a feature for and submitted a patch to GNU coreutils entirely from my phone; if you check their mailing list archives you can find some termux paths in the emails which I forgot to sanitize before sending. I forked and maintained npm packages from my phone. I wrote my own website with my phone. Hell I implemented my own lisp programming language with my phone, perhaps the first programing language ever to be literally born inside a phone.

This is the sort of creative potential you miss out on when you accept this "appliance" nonsense. I can only imagine what the next generation will be like, a whole generation raised on these appliances rather than real computers. A whole generation that only knows how to do what their corporate masters allow them to do.

This notion of "fitness for purpose" is absolute nonsense. Computers don't have a set purpose. Their purpose is whatever we make of them. It fills me with sadness to see that potential reduced to just the things corporations make money on.

> I'm able to write software on my phone. I contributed to free and open source software from my phone. I developed a feature for and submitted a patch to GNU coreutils entirely from my phone

I write software on the iPad Pro w/ Magic Keyboard using Blink and Blink Code, as well as Pythonista, committing code to GitHub from both, so I'm not seeing the loss in potential.

https://docs.blink.sh/advanced/code

But back to the argument:

I loved the Radio Shack "kits" when I was young, built all kinds of things from radios to home security systems. It doesn't follow, for me, that radios and home security systems must be all made from kits.

Similarly, most consoles start as dev kits.

I think there's a place for kits, and a place for products.

>Nope. I personally don't believe such things should be allowed to exist at all.

"Everyone has to be a linux sysadmin to keep me happy, you aren't allowed things I don't want you to have."

Yes? I do consider computing freedom to be far more important than whatever convenience is gained by allowing them to do this. We should always be able to run our own software at all times with no restrictions. If that turns everyone into a "linux sysadmin" I'm okay with that. Better than a future where our computers come pwned straight off the factory, where we need permission from corporations and governments to write and execute software.

You have the same relationship with 'computer freedom' that Stalin had to the freedom of the proletariat.

Companies have no rights. Only people do.

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