Hacker News Reader

Comment by docmars | Hacker News Reader

Oh the horror, it must be so hard for Apple to cave to an open system for these people. What will they ever do without their unbelievable tax on app profits simply for existing on their nearly unlimited real estate, that is, the web?!

I have no sympathy for their concerns. I can download apps on my MacBook machines all day from many different sources, and it harms no one. While I understand the associated risks, computers have been this way long enough that the free and fair use of software on my devices is far more valuable than the brittle safety a marketplace offers.

Apple's greed knows no bounds, and while I'm no big fan of the EU, there are some regulations like these that ensure these big bears in the industry can't abuse their positions for profit, at such unreasonable expense to consumers (not always monetarily, but be it fair access, availability, and choice), and developers especially.

If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time, and only the big hitters would succeed with great resentment towards their gracious corporate overlords.

View on HN

You are not a big fan of the EU after this? They seem to care more about privacy and rights of the people within the majority of the countries that make up the EU then any other outside country that I could name.

Then again, I'm not American so I can easily see the influence your country has on most other countries, so to say the "EU have enormous capacity for overreach at the expense of participating countries and their citizens" is completely ignorant and oblivious.

The EU should make a public service announcement.

Something along the lines of:

"We urge all EU citizens with Apple devices to have an alternate means of accessing critical internet services like banking, to protect themselves in the event we are forced to block all Apple services EU-wide for legal non-compliance."

... then watch AAPL stock drop below NVDA ...

... and Apple come crawling back, suitably obedient.

"forced" to block... seems like the only ones who can use force is them

no, they shouldn't, this will affect customers who already purchased the product and have no fault in this silly war that apple wants to start. no matter what they do, it should only apply to new devices.

Excuse me, Apple started it? That's absurd. Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace. The EU started this fight; Apple is just doing whatever they can to resist change.

> Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years and it's only in the past few years that the EU has chosen to intervene in their marketplace

You literally just described Apple "starting it". They took the initial action (~15 years ago, by your words), starting it, and the other parties reacted, after that action.

I’m sorry, what fight did Apple start with the EU fifteen years ago? You do know what a fight is, right?

They started engaging in the sort of anticompetitive behavior that the EU laws in question were written to discourage or forbid, as you yourself noted when you pointed out that apple's actions took place before said legislative reactions. Here's the quote from you:

> Apple have been running their little fiefdom mostly unchanged for almost fifteen years

Apple could have started out being more consumer friendly from the beginning, and it wouldn't have been starting a fight with consumers. But they didn't, and now they're reaping the consequences.

That's a wholly different claim than the one I disagreed with. Be careful with your language.

Opposing a powerful entity's behaviour is not an excuse for sloppy language or misleading hyperbole. In fact it's especially important to avoid it because the powerful entity only needs to re-frame the criticism around that hyperbole and then proceed to factually disprove it.

Regardless, your new framing is still a ridiculous claim. To suggest that Apple was being "anti-competitive" in 2009 is self-evidently absurd — because their marketplace was simply too small to matter with respect to any competition regulation. They grew their marketplace under the supposedly "unfair" rules which means that the rules cannot be framed as an antitrust violation. This is arguably the most significant point of fact which lost Epic their case against Apple.

If you disagree, then you need explain why every two-bit little nobody who creates any kind of marketplace of any size shouldn't be required to follow strict market fairness rules. Under that logic, Tide could force your local chicken shop to sell Tide products, because they should be entitled to fair access to that chicken marketplace.

It's self evident that apple was engaging in anticompetitive behavior first, because you yourself said they've been operating unchanged for ~15 years, and they're getting in trouble for it now. The obvious conclusion to draw here is that their behavior was always bad.

Indeed, your entire argument relies on some rule about anticompetitive behavior apparently invented just now, something to do with market size? Maybe if we were talking about monopolies, that would be relevant. But a business of 1 user can engage in anticompetitive behavior by locking the user into their ecosystem, or restricting what they can do with their property when it involves competitors.

Apple should have made better choices, earlier: They're engaging in anticompetitive behavior now, so if you claim that they're unchanged, that means they were engaging in anticompetitive behavior before, too. Your framing and claims to the contrary, then, we see are patently ridiculous.

or more likely learn extremely quickly that their citizens prefer their iPhones to their politicians, there would be protests within the hour if they ever blocked iPhones.

Weird to me how common it has become in the last 5 years for people to gleefully cheer for tyranny and control.

You mean the tyranny and control of Apple? With their removing headphone jack, lightning cable, walled garden and all that?

A product you consent to is hardly the same as the government cutting off the ability to use your phone and it sounds very silly to compare the two.

By no means do I agree with the walled garden, I just think cheering for such an absurd idea of the government disabling your phone to fight something most users don't even understand or care about is bizarre.

> A product you consent to is hardly the same as[...]

...The government you also consent to in elections and by deciding where you live?

I'm so sick of this argument: you chose to buy iPhone, it was your decision... But a large part of the law protects citizens against their bad judgement: we don't allow slave contracts or selling your organs.

Within some use-cases, and to a larger degree within some groups of people, Apple is a monopolist. People get *addicted* from Apple ecosystem. If you had a Mercedes house, with a Mercedes charger to your Mercedes Car, that you would park on a Mercedes parking spot near your workplace, it wouldn't be so easy to replace your car with another brand.

Yes, the tyranny of... forcing Apple to open up its walled garden. I am cheering for that and more. Mandate open bootloaders. Mandate user installed EK (Endorsement Key) on all TCB enabled devices.

"Tyranny and control"

I can't get the boomer comic where the guy pulls the calendar and sees the next year is 1984 out of my head now.

Well, yeah, but isn't the EU also responsible for all the trash cookie-consent notifications I get from every website now?

Overall, I'm happy they're actively involved. The hands-off attitude in the US is terrible.

No, it's the builders of the consent notifications who are responsible for that. They are often skirting or even breaking EU law to make it a headache to refuse. The GDPR says, for example, that refusal should be just as easy as acceptance. Having to click to another screen to do that is... not that.

In reality a cookie consent notification can just as well be a small widget somewhere with an accept and refuse button, but it's the builders of these frameworks that have a vested interest in getting you to press accept.

I've applied for a job at one of these companies about a year ago, and I asked them about it. They said to me that according to their metrics, there's about 30% more acceptance if they only bury their Refuse button, so it's a legal risk they are willing to take.

Needless to say, when they invited me for a second conversation, I politely refused.

No, the shitty cookie screens with dark patterns is not the responsibility of the EU - although you could make the argument that the EU should have been stricter or more prescriptive.

It's not just the dark-pattern cookie popups that are a problem - it's having any mandatory cookie popups --even the fairly-designed ones-- on virtually every website that you ever open. That's what's crappy about the implementation.

I once read a light-hearted analysis of the cumulative time wasted by humanity due to the original USB plugs/sockets being unidirectional. I suspect a similar analysis of these cookie popups would be shocking.

Hah, first Google hit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billions-hours-now-being-wast.... (Not sure I agree with the numbers used, but the order of magnitude probably isn't too far wrong)

Cookie banners are not mandatory. If you're just using technical cookies you don't need a banner at all. Websites with them want to track you, that's why they have them. They need to ask for your permission to do so, which I think is a good thing. So instead of being mad at the EU we should be mad at those websites trying to get as much data as possible from their users.

Actually, websites could "not track" BY DEFAULT (so no popup) and have a nice widget in a corner asking for consent to track, explaining why they need it, without this widget being obstructive...

The problem is definitly NOT THE REGULATION but the way that websites have become a data/cash machine...

> Actually, websites could "not track"

Yes, why not stop there?

If you don't collect data you don't need to ask permission to collect data.

https://lokilist.com/about.php

Likewise, a "privacy policy" explains the extent to which your privacy will be violated.

The regulation could have been much better though. For one, it's unclear if Google Analytics cookies qualify. Spain and Austria say one thing, The Netherlands says another, so out of an abundance of caution websites put them everywhere.

I also think it would have been very feasible for the EU to define that a browser could ask for consent once and then apply that to many/all sites by sending a header. So the popup would only be needed for people without a browser that has implemented it.

  > Spain and Austria say one thing, The Netherlands says another

I thought that it is very clear that GA cookies qualify for the banner notification. What should I be reading to hear the opposing opinion?

The Dutch privacy authority claims that a consent popup is only needed for tracking cookies, and cookies with a purely analytical purpose are explicitly exempted. (https://autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/themas/internet-slimme...).

Thank you

But they're not mandatory. There is nothing stopping websites from not doing it, the previous poster was wrong. The GDPR requires consent, how you obtain that consent is irrelevant. Websites could not store cookies by default and you'd have to manually go and opt in. Maybe we even can have a per browser setting.

Specifically, GDPR requires consent before you do (some) things the user might not want. You could simply not try to do those things and then you won't need to obtain consent at all.

It's absurd how used we have become to wantonly collecting user data that some people can't even imagine not doing that.

Yeah. Or, you could make the opt-in something the user has to choose himself, like a link on the page.

GDPR provides mechanisms for getting implicit consent for technically required cookies. For other types of data storage, explicit consent is required. And that's the problem, there are a lot of terrible websites out there that value their ability to stalk you and sell your information more than your ability to use the website.

For consent, the old "hide tracking terms in the terms of service" approach is not allowed anymore. That's where the popups come from, the user needs to know what they're consenting to if the data processing isn't actually required for the website to work.

I would like to see something like P3P (but better) to make a return. We have DNT and its followup, but they're not sufficiently scopable in my opinion.

There's no implicit consent, technically required cookies have a different basis for processing. And, yes, I'm aware of that, my point is that people who create websites choose to force the consent box in front of you, there's nothing in the GDPR that mandates that. It could be a link at the bottom, some header...

  > Maybe we even can have a per browser setting.

DNT header?

Well, note that I said it could just as well be a widget on the website somewhere.

There's no such thing as a mandatory cookie popup. You don't need to get explicit consent if your website needs certain cookies to do what the user wants it to do. Placing a session cookie to log in is fine, for example. And it's also fine to place tracking cookies if and only if the user goes to aforementioned widget and presses the "please track me" button.

But users don't want that, obviously, so websites are built to force you to acknowledge the choice. The problem here is not the implementation of the law - it's the attitude of the website builders.

What if the websites respected my user-agent (browser) setting called "Do not track"? Zero hours would be wasted. I think geizhals.at is one of the few that does this.

In other words, the websites are showing cookie popups in you face because they really, really do want to track you, and for that they need your explicit consent. Nobody forced them to track you. The implementation does not matter; the intentions are crappy.

I think there is a recent court ruling saying websites should respect DNT settings as a (rejection of) consent; if that would be adapted universally, we would be done with the popups.

edit: https://dig.watch/updates/german-court-affirms-legal-signifi...

No banner is required. No interaction at all in fact.

Companies can comply with the law by following the old and standard DNT header. It's transparent to the user, no pop up of any kind.

They chose not to.

They are the ones you should be angry at, not the EU.

Law making bodies are responsible for all consequences of their legislation whether they are intentional or not. They are the ones in charge so the buck stops with them. Make better laws.

With this line of logic, you give absolution to anything immoral that is actually legal, saying the state should have done better.

That sounds like somebody familiar with compilers and interpreters, applying the same logic to law. That reasoning is flawed.

> The GDPR says, for example, that refusal should be just as easy as acceptance.

Not true, actually! GDPR is a framework, and every EU country implements a national law according to that framework (e.g. the Dutch implementation is called "AVG"). The specific requirement that refusal must be as easy as acceptance is not in the GDPR, but several countries added it to their national implementation of the GDPR.

This is a misconception that I've seen going around, and I still wonder where it came from.

The Dutch implementation is called "Uitvoeringswet Algemene Verordening Gegevensbescherming", which, as the title states, is the law that implements the GDPR. "AVG" is just a translation for "GDPR", not the name of the law that implements it.

The Uitvoeringswet describes how the GDPR functions within Dutch law, for example, it describes the role that the Dutch Data Protection Authority plays. You can read the Uitvoeringswet right here: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0040940/2021-07-01

The GDPR (in Dutch AVG, in French RGPD, in Spanish RGPD, etc.) actually DOES state that it should be just "as easy to withdraw as to give consent" in Article 7. The directive (2016/679) can be found here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679.

Eh.

> "as easy to with as to give consent"

The full Article 7, section 3, in English, says:

> The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. Prior to giving consent, the data subject shall be informed thereof. It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent.

I think this can be interpreted as, you ask for consent, it doesn't have to be as easy to say no, but once consent is given - it should be as easy to withdraw it as it is to re-give it after it was withdrawn.

Somewhat badly worded, in my opinion. It doesn't unambiguously say "refusing consent every time it is requested should be as easy as accepting it."

That is a common misconception. In EU law, there are regulations and directives. Regulations are immediately active in all EU countries. In contrast, directives need to be translated into national law by each individual country. The GDPR is a regulation. (for details: https://european-union.europa.eu/institutions-law-budget/law... )

Also, and too often overlooked or silently ignored:

You don't need cookie popups! Really. You don't.

You only need to get consent to track users with software you don't run yourself. Or when you sell your data off to other companies.

Both are, unfortunately, the norm. But there's absolutely no technical reason to have these in place. Non at all. Plenty of alternatives for tracking that doesn't need consent. Or just not sell your customers' data off.

I would be infuriated if I found the bakery down the street is selling its security footage with my face on it, next to my sales and spending in that bakery. I'd expect them to at least warn me about this at the door. So I can then buy my bread elsewhere. That's what a consent banner is!

Thank you for this accurate analogy. Similar to what if the post office delivered all your mail for free but they also opened it and read it in order to send you advertising.

Then enforce the law. Making the regulation and letting people halfway get around it and not holding them accountable just made things worse for everyone

Auto-deny and move on?

https://www.ghostery.com/blog/how-to-block-cookies-on-most-b...

Disabling cookies will cause _more_ of the "cookie prompts" to appear, not less. Some pages these days even will prevent visiting them unless they can set a cookie...

Also, cookies are not the only method of tracking which is supposed to be disabled when you hit Deny.

Ya, can't square the two? Check this out: violence actually works, so should we beat our kids?

The EU is not exactly doing this exclusively for privacy. This is a geopolitical ploy to thwart America's dominance in Tech, as a cope for not being able to produce any homegrown rivals to America's tech giants.

Why do Americans always read backroom politics into everything.

How does the GDPR help EU tech companies? I hope you're not about to tell me it's a ploy to bundle up resources for compliance in US companies or it levels the ground for the EU to be able to compete somehow. It caused enough headaches for us too.

Sometimes a good thing is just a good thing. The US supposedly was a country that had laws made without sinister corporatism at work at one point too.

An alternative - and you have to admit reasonable counter-hypothesis - is that everything you just wrote as a belief is - to some degree - American Cope to explain away why the US can't have what Europe does.

Also known as projection.

> You are not a big fan of the EU after this? Downloading apps from internet is a very cheap price for becoming a "big fan of EU" :D

I'll go further in one regard: the App Store in fact hurts Apple because it has caused a kind of filtering of apps down to those that are the sleaziest.

I used to enjoy exploring the App Store — I resent it now. I'll download half a dozen apps only to delete them within minutes of launching them because of their rent-ware attitude or just plain shitty functionality.

Can you elaborate on that filtering? I agree with you that the App Store is full of chaff, but I don't understand why there'd be a causal relationship between a highly centralized App Store and sleazy apps.

Indeed. Put another way, how would lifting Apple's restrictions result in an improved wheat-to-chaff ratio? I can't see how it would increase the amount of wheat, nor can I see how it would reduce the amount of chaff.

Different stores can have different rules and moderation.

I'm not going to argue about the signal to noise ratio between e.g. fdroid vs Google Play, but it should be obvious that while the signal looks the same for both, the noise is very different, with fdroid having outdated, "developer UI" apps as noise and Google Play having fraudulent scams and malware as noise.

Logically this makes sense, but I can't imagine how many decent apps Apple may have rejected for other petty reasons, only to accept the ones that are lambasting people with rentware and other issues the OP mentioned.

Absolutely. But while we know there are a number of kinda dodgy apps in the App Store, one could only imagine how many more they would be without Apple’s oversight/gatekeeping. Not to mention how much better camouflaged the scam apps could be.

Not to disagree with your main argument - but high end real estate often works that way. The developer is often cut into the topline of the stores.

Not just high end real estate. Your local mom & pop in a strip mall somewhere (at least in the US) has a high chance of paying % of gross receipts to the landlord + rent.

This may vary by location and landlord but it absolutely is a thing. And a guarantee for any high-end, high-traffic location.

Luckily that's a rare thing and the vast majority if commercial real estate has no such rules whatsoever, even on main street.

Demand and supply. As long as there is a marketplace and people have a choice, the market will balance.

I have friends in strip mall businesses and they have moved locations for better landlords.

Sometimes there's something else at play though, because there are situations which cannot be explained by offer and demand. For example, developers are paid less in average than for example some consultant jobs while in my view (and I'm a consultant) both the skills required for a developer are higher while additionally the available workforce (supply) is lower for developers as well.

I mean, consultants, they grow on trees and I know what I'm talking about, I sometines interview new hires as part of my job. Developers, less so.

I don't have an explanation for this, it's a strange effect. But it's just an example, I have observed multiple times this unexpected deviation from the law of supply and demand.

My point is, this law is not a sure fire way to explain any price.

There is a higher demand for a certain kind of consultants (let’s call them “good”) and fairly low supply. There are plenty of people who call themselves consultants but nobody needs them since this is a bit of a winner takes all market (.e.g. like being a broker or even a lawyer to some extent)

I’m very curious how you have this position yet have a MacBook. Why not support a better company like framework?

Because MacBooks are just better. (Have owned both.)

I have owned, and continue to own, all sorts of laptops and phones. I could rant about Apple all day long online, but in the end their product is simply superior.

Within the corporate monopolist called Apple, that is to say within the minds of all its collective employees, lies an old idea still warm and vibrant after decades of waning indifference. This idea is called Apple Computer, and it makes the best gosh-darn computers in the world: the Mac.

It is such a powerful and self-evident idea that those computers are still above and beyond the best ones in the world, even with all those years of indifference.

It's obviously an opinion.

I have plenty of computers running Windows and a variety of Linux distros at my home. Laptops, desktop, servers, and weird hybrids of the former.

Same with mobile - I have tried Android, iOS, PureOS, GrapheneOS.

Apple's UX is so far ahead for me. It's just better. But, you obviously disagree. No need to be disparaging.

Consider stating opinions as opinions, and not as facts.

Heh, Apple Computer also made the iPhone. Everything since launch has been incremental change, not innovative.

Except Airpods. They're pretty sweet.

Until battery life starts deteriorating any that happens real soon and you can’t even know when it started and where it is currently unlike that of, say, an iPhone. Then it’s unusable — hurrah, buy a new pair. The Apple way! :)

This is not unique to Apple. All headphones with tiny batteries in the drivers take the piss after a few years aging.

That said, my MacBooks have the best laptop batteries of any computer I’ve owned. My wife went through multiple laptops in the time I kept one in college. Turns out some electronics just suck!

I have a pair of Pixel Buds, how do I see their current battery capacity and cycle counts?

Are there any wireless earbuds (same / similar form factor as the AirPods) that this doesn’t also ring true for?

> Except Airpods. They're pretty sweet.

Sweet devices that keep falling off your ears. You need AirPod ear hooks to keep them on.

It sounds like you do, most people don't.

The people who do are a significant minority just around ~30-40%. Wouldn't be a tremendous market for ear hooks otherwise. There are thousands sold every day on some retail sites and sometimes thousands every hour if discounted. Out of the 2 dozen folks I know who have bought airpods, 8 have also bought ear hooks. That's ~33%. Anecdotal, but you can look at sell figures and the vast variety of airpod earhooks products if you don't believe me - and look at the 10k-100k product ratings.

I am surprised to hear your experience here. Many of my friends have them and only one has ever mentioned a fit issue. He bought larger tips and they now fit perfectly apparently.

Researching I can indeed see such products exist, although given Apple appear to be selling over 100 million pairs a year[0] (also surprising to me!), I suspect your estimate is inflated. Note this is over 300,000 pairs per day.

Anecdotally, I see people with Airpods daily but have not once ever seen hooks on them. Maybe there's a cultural element at play?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPods#Sales

And yet if your statement were true, it would not explain why others who also own "both" disagree with you. Absolutism does not serve you, there are few subjects in this world that lack nuance.

My statement is very clearly an opinion.

> Because MacBooks are just better

I'm not sure how that implicitly conveys an opinion.

Saying "the sky is blue" is not an opinion when the sky is blue, it's a fact. Saying something is better is also not an opinion, it's a fact. Saying "in my opinion" or "I believe/think/feel like/etc" makes your statement an opinion, ommiting that is ambiguous and is left for interpretation.

"You hate capitalism so much, _and yet you live under capitalism!_ How very hypocritical of you..."

Don't get me wrong, Framework makes a lot of neat stuff, but you can't swap out a Macbook to _anything_ without consequences. It does not take a lot of imagination and empathy to see that for some people, those consequences aren't acceptable at all, or not simply not worth the utterly undetectable sting that a company such as Apple would feel by us not buying a single Macbook from them.

If someone has to alter their entire work environment and process, while Apple doesn't even notice, is that truly worth the moral superiority they'll feel? For a whole lot of people, that answer is "no", and I can't blame them.

And yet we live under capitalism...

What a false equivalency.

No, you can’t avoid capitalism, you’re born in the country your born and you don’t have that choice.

This is more like moving to a capitalist country and then complaining that you live in a capitalist country.

The tech companies have boiled their frogs slowly and deliberately. Apple didn't start out the way it is today after all.

Good point -- With great power comes great inevitable irresponsibility and abuses. The human condition never fails to pollute and corrupt anything as untouchable as Apple. Too big to fail, by definition!

Did you entertain the possibility that Framework might not be available at OP’s place. Because that’s very much likely to be the case, just like it’s not available to a lot of us :)

I see this question a lot.

People complain about the products that are best for them. Nobody (with the power to decide what they use) complains about a product long, unless it is still their best choice.

And suppliers of products being complained about are not companies "not worth supporting". They are making the product that is the best fit for the complaining customer! They are not perfect. They can do better. So customers speak up.

and they're not "supporting" a company by merely buying their product.

They are deciding that said product is the best fit for price on their individual criteria.

To "support" would require you to make sacrifices - aka, buy an inferior/worse-fit product from a company you want to support, instead of from the company that actually offers the best-fit for yourself.

When I bought my MacBook Pro M1 Pro (ugh, stupid names, c'mon Apple!), it was probably the most confident I felt about a technology purchase in years, at least since Apple finally ditched the ridiculous touch bar and gave us back the Escape key and function row.

Aside from me throwing too much at it (should've sprung for 32GB), it's the single best notebook I've ever owned, and the most reliable.

To say it was the best fit for me is an understatement! It's truly great!

Yeah that seems to be a common theme with Apple peeps, being fine with "Well if you don't like what Apple gives you, go somewhere else!"

But like...if someone really does like the product but knows that product could be even better, wouldn't they naturally speak up about it?

Your last point is exactly where I'm coming from here. People complaining about a product is usually a sign of its wide, and possibly avid, use.

After trying UI design tools and web development on Windows and Linux machines and finding the experience very sub-par for my needs, I've found macOS, and by extension, Apple's hardware quality, choice of keyboard layout, ease of use, etc. to be superior for my needs. I have almost no complaints about the Mac platform with the ways I've been able to customize it, and its nag-free experience. As they say, it just works™. ;)

It feels made for UI design & development, with minimal to no configuration, no late nights fixing file permissions or access issues, fixing Linux subsystems, fiddling with very limited terminals, and suffering from buggy piecemeal UI shell packages that prioritize fancy, laggy animations over functionality.

On the contrary, I've found not only doing these tasks and multitasking to be very frustrating when getting serious work done on other machines, primarily frequent interruptions (Windows) and major inconsistencies with global keyboard shortcuts.

For what it's worth, I'm also a staunch Android user, never owned an iPhone, occasionally use an iPad for reading and other content creation, absolutely love my Windows PC for gaming and surfing on my TV, and work exclusively on my MacBook. I'm very particular about using the most suitable machines for the tasks at hand, but well-rounded enough not to be completely captured by Apple.

If it's been a few years since you gave Linux a try, I'd strongly recommend giving it another go.

I had 2 macbooks fail simultaneously over the new year, and instead of laying down the $$$ for a new m3 mackbook, I put a linux station together, with the intent for it to be a windows dual boot.

At this point a couple of months later, windows is no more than a KVM/QEMU virtual machine (and runs its DAW/synth apps, significantly faster and with greater stability than either of my dead m1 macbooks ever did.)

Best tool for the job has changed.

An equipment manuifacturer who's goal is for hw failures to trigger a new purchase and not a repair should be enough incentive to ditch them. We all know Apple has fallen way further than that.

They're a litigious, anti-consumer company that hides behind some fake, faded, John Lennon esque / hipster image.

Time to cut them loose, isn't it?

> If it's been a few years since you gave Linux a try, I'd strongly recommend giving it another go.

I've heard this since around 2004, and did try it every once in a while. And while I have the utmost respect for the Linux desktop developers... the experience was never comparable to me. I'm a sucker for well-thought out and coherent user interfaces, and the rigid principles Apple developers have to follow are no match for a loose group of open source devs.

I will continue to follow their progress, but as it stands, using a Linux desktop on my main machine feels like swapping a Mercedes with a home-built Gokart.

I could say the same things, but at some point I realised that for me the less the interface the better. And Linux is so very good at it.

I've been using only Linux (Manjaro) for the last six years, and although there's been marked improvement it's still in many ways buggier and clunkier for everyday use than even Windows.

Potentially because Macbooks represent a more sustainable model for software distribution and don't prevent people from downloading apps directly from websites.

Precisely! That's the key difference between iOS and macOS devices, essentially. I've never owned an iPhone primarily because its environment is so constrained, and the possibility of losing access to important apps due to failure of approval or other frivolous issues Apple hysterically deems unfit for publishing, is a huge single point of failure not worth risking.

In reality, it's safer to assume that most or all major apps don't have problems with this, so I'm being a little facetious here. Regardless, after nearly 20 years on Android, nobody could possibly pry my muscle memory and features I've come to expect from my cold dead hands. :D

‘Nearly 20 years’ got me. I thought ‘no way, the very first iPhone was released a little bit more than 10 years ago and Android was released a year after’. Then I realised we’re closer to 20 years than we’re to 10 years. It was almost 17 years ago, the very first iPhone!

Daunting to think about, right??

Because people are incredibly entitled and want to have their cake and eat it too.

So you bought an iPhone knowing you can’t download apps and then go cry because you can’t download apps?

Then your argument is that well, all my friends have iPhones or there are some other good features, or whatever else you make up?

So you obviously find value in the product, it’s missing a feature, but you will consciously buy it anyway, it doesn’t make any sense.

Does the standard simply change when a company is big enough?

Imagine ordering a steak salad even though the restaurant doesn’t allow modifications to the ingredients, then throwing a temper tantrum when you get it because it has steak. It’s unbelievable.

Imagine there are only two restaurants in the world and they both only serve steak, yet when you want a salad people say go to the other restaurant.

This is a great metaphor because if we accept it then the salad is the web, yet no one wants that.

I think there is a great desire for web-like application distribution to work well on smartphones, but with none of the drawbacks like poor rendering performance and lack of native features.

Of course, native apps that wrap web-based apps is almost the reverse of that, and we still often get laggy, sub-par experiences as a result of broader platform support for lower maintenance costs.

PWAs fill the opposite gap where you get native-like apps at the expense of low performance, distributed any way you like.

What we really need is for high-performance native applications to be distributable via the open web, and that's exactly what the EU is enforcing here, in a way. What would be better is for WebAssembly to take off and offer native performance in apps that can be visited at URLs, just like we're used to.

Except in this case your beloved android lets you do whatever you want, so why not go use them?

And there are multiple manufacturers that aren’t associated with Google who make phones.

If this were truly such a shortcoming, more companies, in addition to already existing ones, would create phones with side loading apps.

Imagine me pitching my idea to YC, it’s like an iPhone, but with side loading apps! It’s brilliant!

You’d be laughed out of the room.

The issue is you want those good Apple features, you want that Apple ecosystem, the blue bubbles, etc, but you also want to have a feature that the phone doesn’t have and people are crying that Apple won’t give them that feature.

I don’t even care, and I even if I did, decisions already been made so there’s nothing to argue.

This is simply an amusing situation, the grandstanding is simply funny.

Imagine using YC as a corollary for consumer demand (or hell, corporate righteousness).

> I don’t even care

> This is simply an amusing situation, the grandstanding is simply funny.

Wait till the Commission delivers the punch-line.

I don’t think you made the point you think you made here.

It’s possible to not care about something and still submit an opinion. Or maybe it’s the degree of caring that is confusing you, I care enough to comment and have a viewpoint, but I don’t care to the degree that I am upset or will lose any sleep over it.

There you go, hope this helps you understand what I meant there so that you are no so hung up on it so as to feel the need to quote it.

Please do save me the suspense and share the punchline now!

It’s perfectly reasonable to use YC here as at the end of the day they’ve helped launch of ton of companies that are popular with consumers.

Regarding the irony in using them as an example of corporate righteousness, well you did get me there and I agree with you.

> Please do save me the suspense and share the punchline now!

Apple hasn't finished their setup! You might be able to guess where it's going though, we've heard this one before.

Apple is the only one acting entitled here. Why doesn't the App Store deserve competitors? Why should we accept Apple's fees and failures when they deliberately limit competition?

They're acting like an anticompetitive wuss if you ask me. If Apple is the righteous one here (imagine that), they can pack up their bags and tell the whole EU to shove it. They can individually invite all 27 markets to kiss their ass and watch as the relevancy of Apple products plummets in the first world. Problem solved, Apple saves the day. 中国梦!

Or, they can take the king's ransom of iPhone revenue and surrender their asinine software double-standard. This doesn't end well for them either way, there's no sense it making it last longer.

Agreed, and well worded. Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone. Distributing and finding apps wasn't always simple, but then again, the need for a central browsing experience to find and download apps was never truly a thing before -- maybe outside of Steam for games. The key difference with Steam is that the same games have always been available on other distribution platforms, generally, so it doesn't suffer from the same limitations.

Show of hands, how many people actually spend multiple minutes (or hours) just swiping through their respective App Store just to find something new and interesting?

Aside from the store experiences, the web's powerful (gasp!) ability to find and download content including Computer Applications™ has always been its greatest strength. App stores are a net detriment seeking to protect the lowest common denominator: the uneducated computer user who hasn't bothered to learn everyday security practices to avoid downloading malicious apps or vetting software developers on their popularity and/or security themselves.

This takes a little knowledge and practice, but this isn't much different from shopping for good produce in a grocery store. Avoid the rotten fruit, and use your friends/family to help you judge what's best! That's the beauty of freedom on our devices, as it enables the power users and enthusiasts to enjoy these devices at their fullest, without senseless obstacles offering unsolicited "protection".

> . Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone.

wot...

How was playing that Super Mario Bros with on your Sega Master System back in the day? I don't remember Sega having the 10NES subsystem.

Ever heard of this little place in the early to mid 90s called AOL? Compuserve? Prodigy? Any cell phone company long before Apple's app store

And you act like anyone who has a Kindle or a Nook isn't in a walled garden, at least for 99% of the people who don't know/care that you can install books via Calibre or something.

And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling. It was just a massive pain in the ass and drumroll... 99% aren't going to do it.

This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it, and everybody railing again Apple loves to accept it in basically every other facet of their lives.

> This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it

Microsoft got pretty far, up until "the inquiry".

> And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling.

If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.

> If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.

Yep. Exactly.

And breaking free of the walled Kindle/Nook garden is similarly out of reach for about the same number of people that don't care about Apple's walled garden, which is the majority.

Again, they literally exist in every corner of our lives, and the 99% of consumers/normies don't care.

If they don't care, then it shouldn't matter that third-party options exist. The same thing happens on Android, nobody uses F-Droid even if the apps are better and cheaper. The fact that it exists puts meaningful pressure on competitors though, and fills the niche that I use the device for.

The "walled Kindle/Nook garden" isn't similar Apple's ecosystem. A Kindle or Nook will let you access it's EMMC and put Epub files or PDFs wherever you need to. It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there. It's "out of reach" in the sense that you need the skills to follow a Wikihow article to do it - my grandma could figure it out.

iPhones don't let you install IPA files on equal-footing as Apple, ever. That's the problem, and it's what the DMA remediates. I don't care how you or the normies feel about it any more than I consider the public sentiment towards Bell telephone or Internet Explorer.

> It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there.

This is incorrect. Modern Kindles classify books added as "documents" rather than books, which limits their features and treats them as second class citizens.

I doubt most people care, but you're not on equal footing to Amazon loading a book onto a Kindle.

Oh. My Kindle Touch is coming up on 10 years old, I probably shouldn't assume it's the same for everyone.

My primary mechanism to load books on my Kindle is via emailing ePubs, granted, I'm probably in the minority of users but I couldn't ask for an easier workflow.

Why are you defending a trillion dollar company lmao?

Why do you care so much that Apple has been forced to give consumers more choice, you can still just use the app store yourself, nobody is forcing you to use apps from alternative stores.

This is the standard "one true religion" reaction imo.

maybe because forcing people or companies (property of people) is wrong?

The phones are not property of Apple though.

The users should not be forced to run Apple approved applications.

Are you familiar with the history of antitrust intervention and the laundry-list of real-life examples that proves you wrong?

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust-and-cartel...

We have been forcing people and companies into compliance of some sort since the dawn of civilization.

You might find this hard to believe, but people buy products based on a number of factors. For smart phones, the number of factors is dizzyingly complex, and yes, the effects it has on smoothness of communication with the people in your life is one of those factors. Sometimes a specific feature is one of those factors.

What "doesn't make sense" is reducing a complex decision down to a specific factor, and then trying to create the narrative that your specific chosen factor is the sole reason anyone chooses a specific product.

It is completely fair for people to prefer iPhone and also argue for Apple changing their policies.

> So you bought an iPhone knowing you can’t download apps

I didnt know that when I entered the apple ecosystem. Can I have a refund for all the apps Ive bought on my phone?

Dude this is the foundation of capitalism. Its not supply and bend over. Its supply and demand.

It is totally reasonable to demand a better steak salad from some restaurant that doesn't allow modifications and moreover totally reasonable to point out how asinine they are for not making easy-to-do modifications when you point it out since that is what you as a paying customer want.

Imagine we lived in a world where 95% of restaurants never ever and vehemently so denied any modification to menu items. It is unreasonable then to demand they change? I need to move towns to get lunch?

This is the insanity we live in with the walled gardens of Apple.

Because Apple is a company that does actually make great hardware, just marred by their idiot suit and tie MBA best schools social ties 1% tax dodging executive team that wants to foster the cultish attitude of their consumers and... well they succeeded in a way.

To answer directly, I actually really love the Framework conceptually. What they're doing is immensely important for notebooks, and I'd love to see Apple follow suit one day (but I doubt that'll ever happen).

I just can't stand Linux. I've tried several distros and after using macOS since 2009 and Windows since 1995, I just can't be bothered by all the things Linux distros lack, if muscle memory for the other two aren't already the biggest obstacle for me.

I am insanely efficient on macOS, and I almost never have to think about global hotkeys, global search & calculations, managing apps & settings, and seeing nearly zero interruptions while I work -- including popups, notifications, performance dips (if I'm being reasonable with my usage), OS UI bugs, etc.

These all do occasionally happen, but never to the extent I see in popular Linux distros and even Windows. It's just a fact, after nearly 30 years of first-hand usage and comparison.

I also use macOS because it is as extensible and open as I need it to be for downloading and installing packages, and customizing the OS to suit my needs -- which is something iPhones can't do without jailbreaking and such.

I've never owned an iPhone, and seldom use my iPad. I'm an Android guy, and being able to sideload apps in rare, but important, moments is important to me. The openness of Android has been important as well, namely the fact that Firefox has always been allowed to use its own browser engine since the start, enabling the same freedoms I have using it on desktop platforms, as a primary example.

Valid points. Out of curiosity, which distros have you tried?

PopOS most recently, and I ran into significant UI lag, jank, bugs all over the place with the correct NVidia drivers installed and everything. I tried it on two machines, and had pretty much the same experience. After troubleshooting and seeking resources/answers, I eventually gave up and told myself, "maybe in another 5-10 years", as we all say.

That was a few years ago. Anything older I've forgotten honestly at this point. It's been a long time, and I'm certain things are probably better these days, but I have absolutely no reason to switch. My muscle memory and setups on my current machines are too good to let go of.

I have a Steam Deck -- but their experience is so tailored that I'm not sure it counts. I'm not actively using the desktop environment unless I need to use a different game platform. I wouldn't be using this machine for work at all though.

Overall -- a great post.

This part:

   > If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business

As I understand, for luxury fashion brands, this type of contract is sometimes used.

What is the luxury of an app/software?

True, though the situation isn't exactly equivalent.

Using another real estate analogy -

Imagine you bought a house from Fruit Builders company. The house came with a pool.

Now unlike every other pool in existence, this is a very special pool that just really cares about your privacy and security a lot.

It won't let you use any random pool toy (it has lasers), no it must be a well-behaved toy that is rigorously tested and officially notarized by Fruit company themselves (= non-employee contractors taking one look to make sure Fruit's cut is not being circumvented).

So you go to the supermarket, purchase a marked-up toy, the toy company reports its earning to Fruit, and Fruit takes their cut.

All for your safety of course.

Except in the real world, toys generally can’t do things like steal your private data and send confidential data to third parties.

If you’re going to come up with analogies, at least do something that is remotely applicable.

Why not? You are presumably less-clothed in a pool, it could take pictures. Or record private conversations. Or both.

But sure, here's another -

You can run any company's software on a MBP, downloaded from the internet, without paying a dime to Apple. Similar situation applies to Windows / Microsoft.

The iOS model is advocating for rent-seeking in MacOs and Windows binaries.

Why can apps installed from anywhere steal your data?

Surely Apple's OS/framework that they tried to say they spent so much money developing, sandboxes and protects all running code from said data vacuuming behaviour?

Or did you really believe Apple when they said it would reduce security™

Because the only reason it would is if Apple let it happen on purpose so they can create a consumer backlash by saying "I told you so".

If you are worried about your things getting stolen, currently Apple does not do a good job vetting their store.

There was a story that a Bitcoin wallet in the store was stealing peoples funds and had Apple had be notified at least 12 days prior. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685272

So the so-called security is a red herring.

> If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time

FWIW, at least in the US, this is actually how a lot of commercial/retail real estate works. Every mall or shopping center you visit charges rent based on sales revenue.

It must then be a question of perspective and what people are used to, because this specific ruling about the EU and not about the US.

It's of course good to bring up the analogy, but it just means that Apple shouldn't be using American business tactics in the EU, actually.

> If commercial real estate charged XX% cuts of all sales from a business, every business would crumble with enough time, and only the big hitters would succeed with great resentment towards their gracious corporate overlords.

That's more or less what happens in real life. If you are having any success with your physical business, you can bet your ass that your landlord will increase rents. They keep a keen eye on this. Sometimes they'll even state that it's not more than fair that they should get more in rent, since your business is doing so well.

It is not even a tax on app profits, it's a cut of all sales

Look up 'turnover rent'...

Why are you no big fan of the EU ?

In general I lean libertarian, and governing bodies like the EU have enormous capacity for overreach at the expense of participating countries and their citizens.

I won't pretend to know exactly how their processes work in detail, as I'm an American citizen, so the EU's concerns generally don't interest me much, but if the U.S. Federal gov't versus State governments can be used an analogy, I have similar feelings, in principle.

This is a geopolitical ploy to thwart America's dominance in Tech, as a cope for not being able to produce any homegrown rivals to America's tech giants.

have you considered not buying apple products?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com