Obviously this makes a lot of money for them but when you think about it they must think very little of their customers treating them with disrespect like this. This is how 'Tim Cook's Apple' should be remembered.
In fact, the reason why antitrust lawsuits seem to never stick to Apple is because all the mens rea was stored in the mind of a guy who tried to cure his pancreatic cancer with fruit juice[0]. Everything Cook does as a businessman is just the "maximally extended" version of what Jobs either already did on a smaller scale, or had been planning on doing before dying.
The failings of any organization are more often than not the fault of the people who were in charge during the good times.
[0] Fructose speeds the growth of pancreatic cancer.
The difference between iOS and a game console in terms of antitrust law is "not a whole lot."
The EU has been able to get further with restricting Apple's policies because their laws and courts work a lot differently than the US courts. The EU is all about preserving an equal single market economy in every aspect of their economy. The US will let corproations do whatever they want until they are 1990s Microsoft-level dominant.
*The US will let corporations do whatever they want while they are giving "gifts" and "gratuities" to the relevant judges.
There is a lot of corruption in the US. So yes, at times, they will allow that too. But in this case, the commenter was correct.
We can't be going into courts of law making poop up. Going into a court of law and saying that a company with 27% market share in phones and 13% market share in PCs is a "monopoly" is almost on the level of being insulting to the justices. Judges and attorneys are not being corrupt bribe-takers when they laugh us out of court for making that argument. They are just following the law. There's not corruption involved.
People seem loathe to accept the fact that it's time to go the other route, where you just change the laws. Apple is not now, and realistically, probably never will be, a monopoly. Antitrust and monopoly laws do not address what Apple is, and it's time to either make laws that do address what Apple is, or just be honest and say we don't, as a legal system, have any issue with what Apple is.
But this political theater where you make an issue of what Apple is, and then try to address it in court knowing that it won't work is getting really old. We need some leaders who will actually write some new laws and put them up for a vote.
Usually courts don't care about their global market share but their local market share, which IIRC in the US for mobile was somewhere in the 60%. Whether that is enought to make a monopoly claim is debatable, but I assume it is enough to argue abuse of dominant market position.
Regarding your laws paragraph, I do agree that "free market" doesn't really work at the level that the US currently is. There are a lot of problems I have with how the market in the US is regulated (or rather lack thereof), but I don't live there but in the EU, which I honestly am glad of.
Not if your competitor, android, controls 70% of the market.
That's what I meant about being insulting. In court, when we're making these kinds of claims, we shouldn't talk about what could be, we must talk about what is.
And "Android" is a bunch of companies, not one.
It’s important to not just consider the quantitative impact of the monopolist (percent of market share) but also the qualitative components (is it vertically integrated? is it hurting consumers?).
I’m not sure whether or not Apple is a monopolist, but I certainly think there are some arguments.
Apple has over 50% of smartphone marketshare in the U.S. and over 60% of mobile app revenue.
I'm surprised there haven't been more attempts at a "tying" argument against Apple's App Store and their platforms, but I'm also not a lawyer. It has what looks like a pretty clear, long history of being considered an anti-competitive practice by the courts. You can buy a Brother printer and not have to buy paper or toner from them, why should I have to buy my apps from Apple? And to be clear, that is precisely how Apple thinks of the relationship between the user and the app. Apple owns that relationship. They mediate. They manage. They facilitate. No one else. Users don't buy apps. Users pay Apple. Apple pays the app developers.
Epic tried to make this argument in court and failed, mostly because tying is generally not illegal if the consumer is aware of the tie when purchasing and has the option to purchase an alternative product without such a tie.
In other words it would be absolutely legal for Brother to sell a printer that only uses Brother-branded paper and toner, because if you don't like those restrictions you can simply go and purchase a non-Brother printer instead.
I was an iPhone guy. Switching to Android was honestly trivial.
Apples biggest crime IMO is doing everything possible to hide the 30% tax from common knowledge, not that they charge it.
Market share is irrelevant, though. As we can see in this article, the ability to force an unrelated business to transform its business model to fit your needs is monopoly power.
Cite please? IIRC, the present day antitrust precedents were set in the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri....
Antitrust doesn't care about the market share, it cares about actions taken to restrain competition. Government-granted monopolies (e.g. copyright law) have partial antitrust carve-outs: I can't sue Disney for owning the copyright over their own films[0] even though that's extremely anti-competitive. Apple was savvy and couched their defense around their ownership of iOS: i.e. "you can't tell us how we sell our OS". Google could not avail themselves of that argument in the Epic case because they had explicitly open-sourced Android.
But that's not the biggest problem. The Google lawsuit is unique in that not only did a lot of Google's own internal e-mails basically spell out exactly what crimes they were committing, but they also got caught spoliating evidence[1] by aggressively pushing relevant persons in the company to turn off chat history and recording functionality that was legally required to be enabled. In contrast, most of the decision making at Apple was "whatever Jobs thought was best" and people just did what he said. You can't subpoena a corpse. And while there were internal tech emails discovered in the Apple case, none of them were as damning as the Google ones, at least by the standards of a legal system that considers monopolies to be OK as long as you can pretend to be a starving artist.
As for games consoles, the argument[2] is that consoles are special-purpose devices while iPhones are computers. I personally disagree with this, consoles have "apps" now just like phones and they have the exact same positioning that allows them to gain supra-competitive profits like Apple does.
[0] More peripheral claims, such as having a monopoly over theatrical distribution, can and have give rise to an antitrust lawsuit. You have to prove that the market power they are using is above and beyond the market power the government intended them to use.
[1] "spoliate" as in, illegally destroy evidence relevant to ongoing litigation.
[2] Provided by Epic, oddly enough. I know they argued it to try and narrow down Apple's market definition, but I also suspect that was to avoid console manufacturers asserting some kind of universal default[3] / reverse class solidarity move and pulling Fortnite off PSN/Xbox/eShop until Epic drops the Apple lawsuit.
[3] Universal default is a clause added to loans that says that defaulting on any other loan defaults on this loan, too.
27% Worldwide
And that's a single company vs 70% of all the Android device makers.
In the US thats 60% for apple, it is basically a monopoly when your closest competitor is at 24%.
And, to add, 87% of teens in the US has an iphone.
80 fucking 7 %
To add again: the 70/30 worldwide market share is perfectly rappresented in europe (67% and 32%).
Yes, but "only when it harms both allocative efficiency and raises the prices of goods above competitive levels or diminishes their quality."[1]
[1] https://law.stanford.edu/press/congress-hears-challenges-to-...
There's no reason Patreon must use Apple's store. They could run their whole iOS experience out of the web site. iPhone users could use Patreon to their hearts' content, and Apple wouldn't collect a dime. So it's almost as if the services Apple is offering do have value, and people are just arguing about the bill.
The thing is, while iOS is only 27% of the global phone market, that percentage increases when you look at high-value customers. That is, the people with disposable income to spend on fancier phones[0], the people who pay for apps, and the people who would, most critically, donate to an artist's recurring crowdfunding campaign. This isn't even something I made up, it's specifically one of the allegations in the DOJ's lawsuit against Apple.
Now, you are a counterparty to this $3tn megacorporation[1] who owns all your customers. Said corporation is altering the deal: you either bill through our royalty-bearing[2] payment processor or we kick you off the platform. You have two options:
- Upend large sections of your business model to comply with Apple guidelines, including killing an unusually quirky billing model some fraction of your creators make use of, or,
- Leave the platform where all your creators' customers are, hope said creators can get people to follow along through Apple's convenient and extremely discoverable six-step process[3] to install a PWA, and enjoy degraded access to push notifications[4], having to fight Google SEO spam for discoverability, and the ongoing business risk of Apple having complete and total editorial control over how your webapp works on iOS[5].
I'm sure Jack Conte looked at Patreon's numbers, looked at how many subscriptions they get through the app, how many people browse through patreon.com, and realized not being on iOS would screw creators over more.
[0] To be clear, high-end Android phones cost more than iPhones now, but iPhone is still a status symbol.
[1] Incidentally, this is about half the current budget of the US government.
[2] Apple's argument in the Epic lawsuit was that the 30% is a copyright royalty for the use of iOS, which doesn't quite make sense but the judge bought it.
[3] Navigate to the website, press the Share button, scroll down to "Add to Home Screen", fill out the form to name your new home screen icon, tap "Add", relog into the PWA again
[4] Yes, I know iOS added push notification support. I'll believe it when the Google Fi PWA actually notifies me about text messages on my iPad.
[5] Yes, this risk is higher for webapps. Apple can't modify submitted apps after-the-fact (just refuse to host them), but they can modify webpages behind your back by changing Safari. To quote Cory Doctorow: "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it." If users can block ads, Apple can block whatever else they want, too.
This is just hand-waving away my point, though: they can absolutely be on iOS through the browser and nobody has to pay Apple a dime. The fact that they've done the math and decided they must be a distributed iOS app in the Apple App Store means it offers undeniable value. Whether or not it 'screws over creators' is incidental to Patreon, their business model is extracting revenue from creators. Of course they're going to chafe at competition and make sure creators blame Apple for the business expense Patron is passing on to them.
Not sure how this myth keeps getting perpetuated. The antitrust laws that are relevant to the lawsuits against Apple (specifically Epic's and the DOJ's) absolutely care about market share for the purposes of proving monopolization or attempted monopolization under the Sherman Act.
(Yes, technically it is true that some antitrust violations can occur with low levels of market share, such as price fixing, but those are not really relevant to the lawsuits against Apple.)
You don't need antitrust. Just consumer rights.
Antitrust is a necessary precondition for consumer rights.
I don't see that at all. A very small government that is willing to jail execs for infractions would go very far. It's just that the will is not there.
I believe he would very much love the current Apple Tax system and would eagerly fight the EU in court for this, both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple.
Kind of a ridiculous complaint because we all know what happened to the company afterwards. He was more right than they were.
> guy that most probably died earlier than necessary because he did not change his stance on pharmaceutical medicine
Hilariously irrelevant.
> both out of spite and out of arrogance for "his" Apple
I don't see it. He cared about developers - the 30% rate, when he introduced it, was better than any other rate in the industry and was seen as a screaming deal. Before he died, it would have been unfair for Amazon to be getting around the rate while small developers had to pay it. Nobody, in 2011, was calling the rate exorbitant. At the time, your competition (publishing on PC) basically required calling a publisher and agreeing to a 50%-60% fee. Same for Verizon and "dumb" phones - every carrier had their own app store and they all charged 50% or more.
…him complaining about Amazon's reader app making it too easy to buy books without paying the (increasingly literal) Apple Tax.
This is the difference I'm getting at: "We want a cut but our users shouldn't have to pay more" vs "We want a cut and our users can pay for it"
Which is why it's specifically the approach of Tim Cook's Apple to it's customers.
Now this is also a problem with Android (and it's the fault of the app developers), but Android make switching to a different account easy. Apple, doesn't. So, when you have 3-4 apple accounts and want to cancel subscriptions, it's a pita since you need to logout and login to whichever account has the subscription.
Now, you might think that's not a typical use case, but I can assure you that in South East Asia, a lot of iphone users have multiple accounts. One recurring thing about Apple products is that they are designed by people who are not internationally minded (see for example the fact that you can't change the currency when using apple pay in a website and recalculate the totals without stopping the entire flow, or the fact that dual sim in iphones is an after thought and badly designed)
Apple’s policy is one account and other family sharing or child accounts.
Second, what I've described is a problem that a lot of people have because seemingly no one at Apple understands that if you move between countries for work and need to have access to banking (or any other apps that are specific to that country) in those countries, the only way is to have different IOS account per country.
And it's even somewhat supported in ios, if she needs to redownload an app that was deleted due to lack of space, ios prompts her for that specific account's password (not the one I'm currently logged in). So it's somewhat shoddily supported. Nowhere near as good as android, where you can be logged in to multiple accounts and just click on a a menu and chose which account to use.
"Apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other thanuse in-app purchase, except as set forth ...",
And that includes sending promotional emails if said emails were gathered via app.
I vaguely remember the courts being unimpressed with that requirement, and Apple maliciously complying with the judgment by allowing something hilariously minimal and uninformative, like “one tiny in-app link to your main website but you can’t say the word ‘cheaper,’” something along those lines.
(Edited to add: yes, sounds like that came post-Epic, and involved an even more Dantean set of caveats than I’d remembered. Among other things, not only can there be no more than one link, but that one link can only ever appear in one place in the app, it can’t “discourage” in-app payment, and its one appearance can’t be during the payment flow:
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/01/16/apples-app-store-... )
However you will get the app rejected if you show any sign of showing users that you can buy it cheaper elsewhere than the Apple system. You can potentially get away with it by keeping things vague, but even then you might get rejected for “discouraging the in-app purchase system”. This doesnt apply to the EU in which these specific rules were changed very recently.
I can't see that lasting very long.
No, I very obviously saw it on TV and got it from Apple because that's the only way to install native apps on iOS.
In more open ecosystems like the web browser, you can literally install extensions that tell you where you can buy something for cheaper. I'm sure Amazon, Walmart, and friends would love for that to be impossible.
The virtual space only "belongs" to Apple because they've deliberately walled it off.
One analogy: By offering only Fairplay DRM on iPhone, they get a cut that might otherwise have gone to Google (widevine), Microsoft (playready) or some other third party.
Not necessarily. They may have heard about it on the internet and then looked in the app store for it.
If you buy a Disney DVD from Walmart, there will be advertisements inside the DVD case for direct services (heck, last time I checked there were ads on the outside of the case). If you buy a Roomba from Walmart, there will be advertisements for direct parts and addons from the manufacturer. If you buy a hecking Apple Ipad from Walmart, Apple will include advertisements for its direct services once you start using the product.
People bring up this comparison all the time and it's very simply not true. You can advertise direct services inside physical products you sell at stores. What Apple is saying is not that you can't advertise prices in the store page, Apple is saying that you can't advertise alternative platforms in the app itself.
There is no physical equivalent to this for storefronts like Walmart. Home Depot does not have a restriction on whether a physical product you buy from them can have an advertisement for direct manufacturer services inside the box or software that comes with it.
If we want to be consistent about this, Apple really should be paying Walmart a fee for any app-store purchases made on devices that were bought from Walmart. After all, the user got the device from Walmart, right? Shouldn't they get their cut of app store purchases? That's how Apple sees the world.
Several things:
A) Apple doesn't sell a creator subscription service that's the same as what you can get from Patreon.
B) You can advertise inside of a box for services that Walmart does provide (yes, that includes devices).
C) Is your implication that if Walmart did open up a music streaming service that suddenly it would be improper for iOS to advertise Apple Music on devices purchased from Walmart? Because that's a wild thing to suggest.
D) Just re-stating B more directly: Apple advertises direct hardware purchases from the physical Apple store - a direct competitor to Walmart's tech hardware sales - for hardware that Walmart actively sells. And Apple advertises that hardware on devices and within packaging for devices that are bought from Walmart.
Apple's website homepage for the iPad has in big block letters halfway down the page: "Why Apple is the best place to buy iPad." Under Apple's rules, they would not be able to link to this page within an iOS app.
There is no equivalent to this in hardware land.
> Or if you can buy direct it is cheaper from Walmart.
I'm not going to drive over to Walmart to check this, but I severely doubt that Walmart is consistently offering all of its Apple hardware at a cheaper price than an Apple store.
> Walmart is a large enough customer that they won't let you sell it for less (either you don't undercut Walmart, or you will sell zero at Walmart).
Which is still egregious and anti-competitive! But amazingly, somehow less egregious than what Apple is doing. Ask yourself, how anti-competitive and abusive does a company have to be in order to be worse than Walmart? That's almost an accomplishment.
Even if the end users are aware and accept it, that doesn’t make Apple right.
We as a society accept a lot of things - from the security theatre at airports (last week, I saw photos of passengers taken, for domestic flights) to Amazon workers peeing in bottles. As long as we get our crap the same day, we’re good with some unfortunate souls peeing in bottles. If it bothered us, we’d stop shopping at Amazon, for example.
All this to say, we’ve been trained very well to tolerate and even accept a lot of bad behavior if it helps with our laziness. Doesn’t mean it is right though
https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2024/01/17/apples-...
https://www.insightpartners.com/ideas/do-you-have-to-pay-the...
Yes, there is far more discussion in tech/nerd spaces, but it's also being talked about in non-tech areas too.
That is who the average iphone user is.
So outlaw this. Follow the EU's lead and fix this decade-old problem that has damaged the progress of personal computing irreparably. Apple's legacy should be the least of their concerns when they're forced to pay the piper for what they've done. If their recompense was proportional to the money they've stolen from creators and developers then I doubt Apple would even be solvent.
In related news, I just got my keyboard settlement check!
For crying out loud; you just got your settlement for a hardware flaw Apple doesn't admit exists 8 years after they shipped the flawed product. Mankind cannot sustain this pattern of business refusing to back-down from demonstrably harmful practices that their customers can identify and isolate. The Butterfly keyboard is a microcosm of how Apple ships deliberately flawed products in an attempt to market a solution they are exclusively qualified to sell. And despite all this, people still rush to Apple's aid like it's wrong to call them out for being so greedily obstinate. The reality distortion field is still in full effect.
I don’t think any corporation goes into product design hoping to give out free repair service and settle class action lawsuit claims.
Remember that when Apple finally introduced the 2019 MacBook Pro that reverted the keyboard design, it was only 3 years after the original 15” MacBook Pro butterfly model came out. It’s not like they were sitting on their hands for an extremely long time ignoring their customers as you accuse. They completely reverted the design in about 3 years and seemingly forced their lead designer into retirement.
As far as admitting the problem exists publicly, offering proactive refunds, etc, find me a public corporation that will do that and I’ll give you a pot of gold. And recall that the service bulletin and offer to provide free repairs is an acknowledgment of the problem.
1. iPhones (starting with iPhone 6) being constructed to have fragile and DRM-encumbered components (display, battery, camera)
2. Macbook topcases with unibody constructions that can only be replaced as a single $600 finished assembly
3. Macbook bottom chassis for using glue instead of tapped screws to prevent safe disassembly and repair
4. Airpods being entirely impossible to service in any way (and conveniently removing the 3.5mm jack for alternatives)
5. Vision Pro being designed to stop functioning if non-essential features like the eye-tracking or the glass panel up front are broken.
Why is this a conspiracy? Because we can easily prove Apple knows about the pressure they're creating for customers. At first it was AppleCare that capitalized on these insecurities, giving the rich a solution that doesn't even repair their Apple products in the first place. Before being criticized for it, Apple themselves did not even want to repair Apple products. They'd rather trash your old one and give you a new one. Then the criticism came in, and instead of designing their products better Apple creates a new first-party repair program with worse DRM problems. Worse yet, they're still forcing you to buy entire component assemblies to fix a single broken part. Did your display's power IC break? That's a $2 Texas Instruments component you'll be paying $150 to get replaced. Don't forget your $49 repair kit rental. $200 to fix a $2 part.
You might say this is all very smart, on Apple's behalf. Too much so; with the DRM scheme they've created it's impossible for you to do cheaper repairs even if you wanted to. You have to buy first-party components, and even donor-boards won't work as sources of cheap spare parts. So Apple went out of their way to stop third-parties from being capable of performing profitable repairs. They've prevented users and repair shops from buying the components they need and using software they have blocked you from even attempting to fix things yourself. Sound like John Deere yet?
You know why Apple takes 3 years to sheepishly fix a mistake they don't admit exists? Because they make money off it. People stuck on old models are forced to get one with a usable keyboard. Hell, before they started (2 years after shipping btw) the free repair program as a response to lawsuits, they were charging users for new keyboards. It's a racket; you would have to be actually blind to look at Apple's history of behavior and assume it is not arranged for profit over any other single value.
BTW, this is not my opinion but instead a re-hash of the criticisms that Apple-certified repair stores have levied against Apple. People have been complaining about this since 2016 and if you step outside HN you may notice that people care about Right to Repair.
Still shocking such a bad an sonically ugly keyboard launched though.