If you don’t reward invention you get China, where inspite of everything, can’t seem to come up with new ideas of significant impact.
Exception for Apple themselves, of course.
People keep falling for the just-world fallacy[1], and companies exploit this through the use of propaganda (ads, marketing, yadda yadda) and most people eat it up. No company (not Spotify, not Apple, not the woke-est, most DEI company out there) cares about anything other than profits at the end of the day under capitalism, because capital rules everything and politicians are not exempt from the rules of capital.
They have decoupled their incentives from their users incentives to extract more profit, and then they lie and use scare tactics to gaslight their users into thinking this what they want.
Asymmetries need to be balanced, such as the balance between labour and capital. Unions help labour, but thanks to a decades-long propaganda campaign against unions, we no longer have that push back against capital.
Personally I think the problem will only get worse, so I'd suggest buying the S&P 500 with as much cheap leverage as you can afford.
This is reductionist, like saying all biological behavior is about reproducing. Yes there’s a primary goal. No, that does not define or dictate the how. There are people making decisions about what to fight and where to spend the effort. Fighting and weaseling pro-consumer regulations is a choice, obviously, since Apple is being a much bigger crybaby than even other big corporations.
Purdue Pharma (opiates) is a good example of a company following its incentives that eventually was brought down for violating broader common sense values.
The values Apple are violating come close to being just as widely held ("something I buy should be mine") though perhaps you need some expertise or professional experience with tech to see the violation clearly enough to be as horrified.
Still, values held within communities of experts (like this one) can also have the power to correct incentive-chasing behavior when it runs amok, if only because sufficient misbehavior can make it harder to hire and retain the best experts. So it's wonderful this conversation is happening here!
My Android phone does the same thing :).
While custom ROMs exist you’re then at the mercy of cat and mouse hacks to evade security checks from bank apps and the like, something that many don’t have the time or energy for.
This is simply the tyranny of the minority.
Why would you think someone who knows about the (evidently) minutae of what Android advantages over Apple are would be surprised at that?
> Apple is doing everything they possibly can to suck every single penny out of it, at huge economic burden
The advantages you list, which are supposedly creating huge economic burden, are actually the very reasons that Apple is a huge economic success both for itself and its customers. Many people have decided they get more value by not having these things. And people like you who do want these things have great alternatives .
This is the definition of functional market and is how economic value is created.
EDIT: sorry, thought it was COGlory who replied. The rationale is the same.
This is pure marketing talk, and something I'm not sure people actually ask for. People have been buying PCs forever, where you can install anything you want without permission from anyone.
While I have other machines, I still run Windows 7 on my main PC, often install random freeware on it and guess what? It's not just that the world doesn't end -- nothing happens.
The main purpose of this endless talk about "security" is to scare people into compliance.
It's not marketing talk. My mom is terrified of clicking on the wrong thing on her PC. She doesn't know what she can trust. Ads masquerading as official Windows notifications, etc.
She is totally comfortable browsing and installing from the app store.
It's really almost like HN has learned nothing since the infamous Dropbox comment.
The iPhone is already dangerously capable, Apple can't have their cake and eat it too.
Some of you have incredible confidence to be shouting at hundreds of millions or billions of people and telling them they are wrong.
You. Are. The. Minority.
Expand your mind.
The only person I've ever known who exclusively used Apple-native apps was my ex-boyfriend who wrote Mac software. I've never known anyone else who refused websites or calls on the basis that Apple doesn't review it - I think that mindset is far in the minority.
Imagine if your refrigerator charged your grocery store $0.50 every time you opened the door?
Food producers and sellers need to meet certain standards to sell their food. We take these standards for granted but they aren’t without cost. We like the standards because it means that we can generally trust the safety of the food we buy without needing to know much about it.
This is the point Apple sells on. Users are able to download apps and configure their phones without _any_ concerns of compromising their device.
Not everyone wants these guidelines and protections but for a large number of people they are worth a premium.
Imagine if every time you installed software on your Mac, they charged a $0.50 fee to the software maker. Even for a shell script.
How is that ANY different?
They're only doing this with iPhone/iPad because they can, because by the time they realized it could be a profitable business for Mac the expectations with their customers had already been established, and they had too much competition.
As soon as they had a competitive edge with iPhone, they resorted to rent seeking.
That's not historically accurate, and I worked in a core engineering group at Apple. An early concern on battery-dependent devices was that the software running on them would not deplete battery wastefully, and the famous/infamous offender giving rise to what you (understandably) question was the Flash runtime. The upshot of poorly written software (which gave rise to attempts to test and charge for access, which you dislike) was customers in a competitive landscape (Symbian and Android) thinking Apple hardware sucked, while that was not the hardware reality.
So, I get your perspective but it's overlooking the early and very real problems which caused this gateway/gauntlet to attempt improving user experience as a higher priority over developer inconvenience.
I do appreciate the ability to control the software on my devices but I'm worried that soon you won't be able to do banking without an official fully locked down device.